


Observer Effect

by Ezlebe



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fringe Fusion, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Scientists, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Parallel Universes, Pseudoscience, paranormal elements
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-22
Updated: 2018-02-12
Packaged: 2018-11-17 07:34:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 52,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11270976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ezlebe/pseuds/Ezlebe
Summary: “Today isn’t about nanorobots, Dr. Hux,” Skywalker says, giving a low exhale. She pauses for a long moment, then closes the folder in hand. “It’s about Ben Organa.”The ensuing silence indicates handily how she’d been expecting a question in return for the declaration. He couldn’t care less. He needs to get out of this room more than ever; out of this country; out of this continent. His specialty is war, now, and it seems to be going around.





	1. Chapter 1

“Dr Hux, good evening,” the woman says, sparing a greeting only after getting him fired, taking him into custody, and chaining him to a table. “My name is Agent Skywalker. If you'll pardon the accent, I’m with the American FBI.”

Hux refuses to look up, to act interested, folding his hands together on the table like the cuffs make no difference. A silent witness is no witness at all; although, he’s not certain what he’s been called in here for – it could be any number of things, and recently he did have something of a run-in with a buyer that had to be rejected.

“You’ve come a far way from robotics, haven’t you,” Skywalker says, shuffling some papers with a low hum. She puts the folder down, picking up another, “It says here you used to develop nanorobots to be used for surgery. You even killed an innocent sheep, looks like.”

“I'm not associated with that field anymore, Agent Skywalker,” Hux says, keeping his voice level and resisting an urge to glance at the folders, to drag them over to his side of the table; he needs to know what they’ve got him here for, not to be glad handed. “Perhaps you should arrest my old colleagues in research.”

“Today isn’t about nanorobots, Dr. Hux,” Skywalker says, giving a low exhale. She pauses for a long moment, then closes the folder in hand, “It’s about Ben Organa.”

The ensuing silence indicates handily how she’d been expecting a question in return for the declaration. He couldn’t care less. He needs to get out of this room more than ever; out of this country; out of this continent. His specialty is war, now, and it seems to be going around. He doesn’t need Europe.

“Ben Organa is a key witness to a case I’m working on, but he managed to alter the terms of his… _convalescence_ to disallow anyone to speak to him other than you,” Skywalker continues, dropping more unsolicited information, though this is almost resigned and vaguely cross, like she thinks it had been done only to irritate her. “He won’t even speak to his real family.”

Hux feels his mouth twitch with the effort to smother his opinion. Ren’s _real_ family had refused to accept his work; his _real_ family had chased Hux out of the country; his _real_ family had hid their son away for a tragic story rather than a scandal during election season. “I’m sure you can get one of your patented court orders like the one that got me in here.”

“Don’t you want to see him?” Skywalker prompts, seeming unhindered by his dismissal. The use of a new, more personal tactic so soon is odd; she must be in a hurry. “You did marry him, Dr Hux.”

Hux scoffs under his breath and looks up before he can control himself, rather shocked at hearing her even say that aloud. It hasn’t been brought up so directly in literal years. “My student VISA was declined. Surely, even you know that.”

“And he’s been institutionalized for two years,” Skywalker says, raising a slim eyebrow and tilting her head. “You’ve been out of the United States for a similar time. Did it not occur to file for divorce?”

Hux holds her eyes for a moment longer, raising a brow back in attempt to seem indifferent. The thought had surfaced, once or twice, though he’d never done so much as find the paperwork. It was admitting VISA fraud, for one, and he had yet to find a valid reason to, for another; his legal status made it all too convenient to avoid certain social encounters.

Skywalker narrows her eyes, only to glance down with a visible start, furrowing her brow at Hux’s hands.

Hux follows the look and resists an urge to reorder the fold of his fingers. He does curl his thumb back to the cup of his palm, stopping the anxious spinning of too-loud gears around a rather prominent band. It means nothing like what she might be assuming, little more than a taunting gift become practical.

“We can do the paperwork right here if you’re willing to sign,” Skywalker says slowly, taking a deep breath and standing from her chair with a dull scrape against the concrete floor. She walks near the mirror, doubtlessly communicating with whomever is on the other side through some sort of signal. She's holding a phone at the head of the round, pausing just behind her chair with the display held out, tiny texts lighting up the screen. “It could be filed an annulment, apparently - non compos mentis. With the habits you both had at the time of the marriage, might say neither of you realized what you were doing. Ben doubly so.”

Hux immediately finds himself gritting his teeth against an irrational reply, glowering at the chain hook and trying to count in measures. He just needs to wait out until Skywalker realizes she’ll be getting nothing from him. He will be able to leave soon, pretend to forget, maybe revisit some of those _habits_.

“Yes, I know a lot about his affection for concocting experimental drugs, getting people to try them,” Skywalker continues, “I’m sure in another life, he’s happily sharing some condo in Colombia with a supermodel.”

Hux feels the words catch like to razors at the back of his mind, but he refuses to look up again to see the smirk that must be across her smug mouth. It may not have been anything other than a convenient piece of documentation, could never have been between their work and respective arrogance, their overabundance of pride… but to hear someone dismiss their relationship to his _face_?

It makes him burst with a heady rage he hasn’t felt in some time.

“You can speak to him yourself or give up your rights to – either way will get you out of custody,” Skywalker says, pausing her slow circuit of the room once more, but this time just near Hux’s chair. She gives taps her fingers against the edge, as if she’s lost his attention, “But _neither_? I know some people eager to get you in a cell for war crimes, Dr. Hux. Me among them.”

“Regardless of these attempts to coerce my complicity, Agent Skywalker, his location was never disclosed to me,” Hux says, speaking through teeth that feel welded together into an uneven seam. He hardly wants to go to prison, but… the idea of annulment is oddly repellent, not to mention would erase his chances of ever stepping foot in America again. “I believe the Senator said it was for his safety.”

Skywalker is silent for a moment, then exhales softly, her hand appearing on the table just next to Hux’s arched fingers. “I can take you to him.”

* * *

 

“I'm here for Ren,” Hux says, feeling awkward as he stands at the off-putting glass window. He doesn't understand at first when the receptionist raises a curious eyebrow, until abruptly he does, feeling the jet lag like a physical smack. “Ben, I mean. Ben Organa.”

The receptionist looks even more suspicious about that, and glances down to their computer with a pinch at their mouth. A few seconds later, their eyes go wide, looking up to Hux and then down to the display more than a few times, visibly skeptical, “What is your name and relation, sir? Mr Organa has a very strict visitor policy.”

“Dr Armitage Hux,” Hux says, pausing and hoping that might be enough, then clearing his throat at their narrowing glare, “ _Husband_.”

“There's no record of you ever visiting before, Dr Hux.”

“No,” Hux agrees, feeling both irritated and shamed by that single, judging look. It's not a look labeling him an old lab partner who made a questionable legal decision, but an estranged husband that abandoned his spouse to an institution. “May I have my visitors pass, now.”

The receptionist is silent for another moment, then reaches out and opens a drawer, slowly grabbing a card from inside. Their expression remains reluctant as they stand, leaving their glass box to meet Hux, then gesturing for him to follow as they unlock a pair of wide doors with their own card.

“Those auto lock when you leave,” the receptionist says, leading Hux further down a brightly lit hall. They pause at another pair of doors, peeking in a window for a moment, then sighing as they settle back on their heels. “He's in there; far left corner in front of the bookshelf. If you cause a disturbance with him or the other patients, you will be escorted out and likely banned.”

Hux nods slow, clipping the card awkwardly to the corner of his vest.

“Have a nice visit,” the receptionist says, still visibly cautious even as they turn back around on their heel.

The door seems ten times bigger once Hux is standing in front of it alone, and he has to force himself to press a hand to the side, gently swinging it open a few centimeters. The noise inside is something like a dull roar, at least thirty voices speaking quietly to each other, and a quick sweep across the room reveals that everyone is grouped in two or more, all except the lone figure at the far left that sets Hux’s heart to a frantic pace.

The short distance gives time for Hux to observe this man with Ren’s face sitting in a predictably dark corner, thin beneath a pale hospital jumper, wrists stark against sleeves and collarbone visible along the scooped collar. He doesn’t take to leanness the same as Hux, all his considerable muscle atrophied into little more than wide bone and thin skin; it hurts too look at him.

“You weren’t meant to come,” Ren greets, barely glancing up from what seems to be apathy, his tone bizarrely lifeless. His eyes seem only for the small board at his table, dotted with black and white; he’s playing Go against himself. “I didn’t want you to.”

Hux feels a hard twinge at the back of his mind that he promptly ignores, trying to smirk, “I do like to irritate you.”

“Did,” Ren corrects, his voice holding that dull monotone. His hands are motionless as well, back rigid in his chair like some automaton; where is the man who always seemed to be slouching, rolling his eyes, fretting at anything between his fingers?

Hux glances down, wondering if he should sit in the empty chair across from Ren. It seems inappropriate for some reason, like he’d be lying somehow, and he shifts on his feet rather than moving, “Do you know the FBI wants to speak to you?”

Ren is silent for a long moment, his hand hovering just over the board. A visible tremble draws from fingertips to elbow, nearly answer enough, “No.”

“It’s – ” Hux lowers his voice with a swallow, still ludicrously wary after all these years, “Is it Snoke?”

Ren glances up, his eyes barely a flicker but definitely flashing against the dull lighting.

“Only a guess, Ren,” Hux continues, feeling an unreal amount of relief at having gotten even a short glimmer of acknowledgement. “No need to look so startled.”

“No one calls me that here.”

Hux is quiet for a long moment, unsure how to respond, then clears his throat. “How is your… _condition_ , anyway?”

“Managed,” Ren says, making a slow move with black, grasping the stone and laying it with a quiet click. He tips his head just slightly, but doesn’t look up again. “People in here, they’re just – their minds are muted. So is mine.”

Hux reaches down and takes a white stone between two fingers, tapping it against his ring for a moment before setting it down for a false eye. “You still noticed when I walked in.”

Ren doesn’t try to make another move, silent for a long few moments that dig a spine of uncertainty into Hux’s mind. He stands without warning, stepping forward and making eye-contact like he hasn’t been evading the last five minutes. “Why are you really here?”

Hux stares back a long moment into a pair of startlingly lackluster eyes, mostly empty of the disturbing intensity that had once garnered complaints and started fights. Hux determinedly raises his own eyebrows, shoving out half-hearted sarcasm. “Don’t you know?”

The silence stretches, then the sudden press of lips, a familiar large hand on his waist that is more of a surprise than it should be considering the circumstances. Hux kisses back before he can stop himself, but the cloying misery clawing up his throat makes him pull back; he had almost managed to forget how well they fit together, despite everything else.

“Bye,” Ren mutters, shifting away and slumping down back in front of his game.

Hux feels like his lungs are on fire, tight and suffocating within his chest. “Ren, you – “

“Sir, your time is up,” a nurse interrupts, appearing from nowhere with a bold hand reaching out and outright grabbing at Hux’s elbow with a decided tug.

Hux pulls back his arm with a snap once they’re standing in the emptier hall, away from the staring eyes of other patients and the resigned pinch of Ren’s mouth. He’d known the nurse was coming. “I thought this wasn’t a prison?”

“We have similar procedure,” the nurse says, utterly indifferent and gesturing down the hall with a short movement of their transgressing arm. “Please note the time when you sign out.”

Hux glares after as they leave him standing in the hall, disappearing down into a door a few meters further under a glowing sign. He turns and looks to the other end at the exit for a moment, then curls his lip around his teeth, peeking back into the communal room with focus on the far corner.

Ren remains in front of the Go game, to all appearances still completely put together… if for a hand gripped around his knee. The sight is something of a relief, a signal that it wasn’t only some robot with a familiar face, preprogrammed to give bored answers, but it’s hardly what Hux once experienced on a weekly basis – the Go board would be on the ground, or at least the other chair kicked onto its side.

“Mr. Hux?” a voice calls, followed by a short padding of sensible shoes. A low cough echoes the hall, “Armitage Hux?”

Hux inhales and looks down, forcing himself away from the image on the other side of the door. Another nurse in dark scrubs hovers just to his left, wearing a mousey smile and standing there with a package at their side – a bundle of envelopes tied with a bright red rubber band.

The nurse tips forward on their toes. “ _Are_ you Armitage Hux?”

“I am,” Hux says, biting back a reflex demanding he be called by his title. “Why?”

“I shouldn’t be doing this, _but_ … the first few months, Ben wrote you letters,” the nurse says, lifting the package and turning it over in their hands, dragging a thumb down the side and showing the five or so thin envelopes. They look up with a weak smile quirking at their lips. “He never included an address, so we couldn’t send them. I apologize.”

Hux looks down at the small bundle, barely thicker than a finger.

“You should have them,” the nurse insists, shoving the envelopes at his chest with more urgency than seems strictly appropriate. A reluctant look crosses their face in the next moment, eyes darting toward the doors with a grimace, “I'm sorry we had to pull you away so soon, Mr Hux. Over the years, we’ve found Ben can be very – “

“Emotional, or excitable, maybe _engaging_?” Hux interrupts, surprised at the force of the words escaping his mouth. He reaches out and snatches the letters from their hand, clutching the bundle in a fist between them and pointing with an accusing finger. “Yes, I saw how very well you cleansed that from him for myself. Congratulations on such success.”

The nurse gapes, frozen and wide-eyed.

Hux glares for a few moments longer, then drops his hand and the envelopes to his side. He takes a deep breath as he turns, exhaling slowly and shoving the door open to the waiting area, ignoring the receptionist, and marches straight to the steps as his teeth begin to gnaw a hole into his lower lip.

Skywalker’s black sedan is nowhere to be seen, no longer in the round drive, nor out near the trees in the small carpark. He tries to remember what she said she’d be doing, why she’s not waiting here when this is all her fault, but his mind is still stuck on that disheartening image of Ren, looking small and sitting all alone. After the settlement, Hux had assumed it would only be a few months, but he’s still here two years later lingering as a fading shadow of himself.

The paper pulls at Hux’s hands in the soft breeze and he looks down, then slumps onto the stone entry steps. He gently uncoils the rubber band, flipping through the envelopes with a heavy sigh. His name is on the front of each one, no address and no stamps, but while the first couple sport ludicrous misspellings of his given name, the remaining make little attempt at similar humor. He doubts it was because Ren ran out of ideas.

The top envelope is crumpled and creased in the middle,  the back still sealed, but the old glue gives way easily under Hux’s thumb. He finds inside cheap paper, lined and frail, with Ren’s messy scrawl pressed hard through with blue ballpoint. The sight of it alone is enough to jumpstart a panic underneath his ribs, and he nearly folds it back up in what feels distressingly like a flight reflex.

_Dear Armandage,_

_I don't know why I'm even writing. The courts ban computer privileges and the ‘doctors’ look through my notes for any signs of the intelligence that got me in here, so I’m stuck with this like it’s 1876. They told me to write someone to keep my mind off it and I think they meant to my mother, but as unlikely it seems, I miss your apathy. Your dismissal. The people here walk on eggshells around me. They're worse than the Board after you told them we'd go to CalTech if they went to you with more complaints about me._

_Not that it matters anymore. It's barely been any time, but it already feels so long. I look in the mirror and see myself, and they tell me it's been weeks, but it seems like years. It's likely the next time you see me that I will be of sane mind, and similarly unrecognizable in body. I admit I hope it never comes to that, because you'll probably be carrying a settlement. Tragically, you’ll be leaving empty-handed, I’m sure most of my inheritance has regressed to my mother. _

_Or you might already have it. I’m not sure how it works._

_-R_

Hux rolls his eyes, scoffing and folding the paper back up into its envelope. He had honestly never contemplated Ren’s money, not even after the incident when his life was falling apart, but he’s fairly certain it’s paying for the extended stay at this place. The letter gets stuck under his leg and he grabs what seems to be the next, labeled _Aarmtiq Hux_ and sporting an interlocking pair of gears at the corner where a stamp might have gone. He tries not to feel too sentimental about it.

_Hux,_

_The doctors are morons, deluding themselves with soft sciences and assumptions. You would hate them. I’ve begun to play Go with a woman here who has little else and sometimes she nearly beats me. I'm not sure if the medication has made me stupider, or if her twelve years of claiming to play the ghosts of this place holds merit. Either way, it is proof enough no one here is qualified at their job._

_I have days where I am so medicated that I can barely see, barely hear. It's worse than my experimentations. At least I had some control of those. The doctors here refuse to listen that I know more than them. I only killed someone, I didn't lose my IQ._

_-R_

Hux stares at the closing lines for a short moment, earlier tightness in his chest rising before he quashes it back down. He stuffs the paper back into the envelope and shoves it down with the first one, grabbing the next and –

“Doctor!” Skywalker shouts, a few quick steps digging through the loose gravel until her booted feet stop just under Hux’s eyes. “Why are you sitting on the stoop?”

“Agent Skywalker,” Hux says, trembling hands clumsily folding the envelopes back into a crumpled stack and recoiling the rubber band to keep it together. He takes a breath and looks up with his best glare. “You neglected to tell me there was a time limit to my visit.”

Skywalker frowns, glancing up at the main doors with a narrow squint. “Did he say anything?”

“Predictably, no,” Hux says, standing from the steps with a lift of his chin. He settles his mouth into what he hopes is a hard line of contempt, and not the vaguely unsteady frown he’s felt around his mouth since he walked into the hospital.

“Are you sure?” Skywalker says, her voice strangely pitched – not exactly disappointed, nor remotely unsatisfied. She only seems to be expecting… more, trailing back to the car at his heels. “Maybe it was vague.”

Hux pulls at the handle, then stops, his other hand around the edge of the car door, and turns around with a genuine scowl. He’d welcome even _vagueness_ at this point, considering how little she’d really told him aside from volunteering him to speak to Ren rather than being arrested. “You didn’t tell me what to ask, why I was here, or what he may do for you – I don’t know what you expected anyway, Agent Skywalker.”

Skywalker curls a finger around the bridge of her sunglasses, dragging them down with a narrowed eye toward his hands. “What are those?”

“They’re… mine,” Hux says, shifting the letters further out of sight.

“Infringing on an investigation can – “

“They’re letters, _Agent_ ,” Hux interrupts, tucking them under his leg once he's sat in the car. He drags his fingers absently along the edge of the door again, glancing up in a manner he hopes is suggestive, “Personal ones. Very personal.”

“Oh,” Skywalker intones, lips pursing with the predicted discomfort. She walks around to the driver side and slides into her own seat, pausing for a long moment before reaching down and shifting into gear. “I have some stuff you should take care of before you go back.”

“I’m not making a second trip,” Hux says, his voice more determined than he truly feels; he already wants to tell her to turn back, let him go in and shake some real reaction out of Ren. “The terms of our agreement have been met. I don't see how he could have helped any only being allowed to speak for five minute intervals.”

Skywalker doesn’t seem to care to offer any rejoinder to that, no explanation or apology on her lack of proper disclosure. She sighs a moment later, a heavy, heartfelt exhale. “It's not actually to do with the case.”

Hux narrows his eyes at the window, resisting the reflex to turn around and dismiss her request outright. He still doesn't know what the FBI wants, only that they've managed to shelve the humanitarian case that might be built against him, nor re-visited the outright confession of VISA fraud. The testing of his limits in either of these cases would be… particularly unwise.

“It’s sort of complicated, but Ben named you the trustee of his estate and person at the time of his technical self-admittance _after_ his required time was up in order to solidify declaring you his sole visitor, as well as making you medical proxy,” Skywalker says, taking a deep breath and gesturing cyclically just as she turns and gives a tense smile at the guard. She waits for the gate to open before really continuing, glancing back and speaking lower as if they might hear her, “Technically, it shouldn’t have been official at all until you signed with a notary, and the legal side of it makes no sense, but the courts held it up based on your marriage when the FBI wanted to question him, essentially declaring it prematurely legitimate.”

Hux is quiet for a long moment, expecting more context, and swallows hard on his irritation when she remains quiet. “You still want me to sign?”

“Yeah,” Skywalker says, exhaling with strange relief, “If you’re not going to divorce him, I mean. It’s not a lot with the way the _family’s_ trust works, mostly this shoddy coastal house in Maine. But it would get my – people off my back.”

“Maine?” Hux repeats, a wash of noise swiftly taking over his senses. How often had Hux mentioned that little idea – once, maybe twice – and Ren had bought a _house_. An entire house because Hux was chatty when they took experimental psychotropics; he’d only ever thought about it because of a minor obsession with Stephen King.

“Yeah, I was surprised, too,” Skywalker says, reaching forward and flipping at something on the radio at a streetlight. “ _Maine_ is a bit odd, but he does have a lot of money and not a lot of sense.”

Hux recovers enough to look out the corner of his eye, taken aback, “I’m sorry?”

Skywalker raises her brows in turn, oddly caught behind her sunglasses. “Ah, it’s, uh… No one with that much money really has sense, Doctor.”

Hux narrows his eyes before looking forward again, making a note to investigate into her later. He has an uncomfortable feeling he’s missing a connection to America’s unofficial royal family; she’s probably been updating Senator Organa on Ren this whole time. It would certainly explain why she kept mentioning a divorce.

“Could I get the key to this house?”

Skywalker is silent a suspiciously long moment, then clears her throat. “Yeah, I think so.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “This is the last thing I expected from you,” Ren mutters, his voice fleetingly regaining that nasty edge. “Your life must be really shitty now.”
> 
> Hux rolls his eyes, shaking his head into the side of Ren’s neck. He should have shaved, he’s sure his two-day old stubble doesn’t feel quite as forgiving as Ren’s usual disheveled goatee.

The drive out to Portland is shorter than the ferry to the apparent  _island_ , little more than a strip of wooded land on the outer edge of a small bay. He peers down at the map he saved on his phone, stepping off the dock and to the street, ignoring a kiosk trying to shove a bicycle or a golf cart at him with a smile and a bill.

The thin road is muddy and uneven under his feet, but the walk is short, and he’s soon standing in front of a grey washed two-story with an overgrown drive and a winding dirt path leading to the back. He can hardly believe it's real; a tangible souvenir of Ren’s capriciousness and access to exorbitant funds.

He stares at it a few moments longer, glancing from a cracked window to a faded set of numbers near the door, only able to step forward once the house loses most of its luster of impossible. His key slides into the lock with an almost disturbing amount of ease, aligning tumblers clicking loud in the peaceful silence of the island. He takes a deep breath before pressing down the handle, gently pushing open into a dim, empty hallway split by a staircase.

He hesitantly moves forward with a slow step, flinching some at a creaking floorboard, and takes in the house around him as the door closes behind him with a quiet click. The pale blue walls and windows he can see from the entry are dusty with neglect, a few cobwebs visible here or there in corners, but not an awful vision of squandered future. It certainly could be open and welcome with enough imagination, and he can already see where a few pieces of Ren’s old, awful art might have gone could he have gotten any of it.

He takes a slow breath, closing his eyes for a moment as he grits his teeth to swallow back a well of anxiety threatening to heave from the middle of his chest. He was so self-absorbed, arrogant in his work –  how could he have never known Ren bought a  _house_?

A foreign noise echoes through the silence, at first unrecognizable until it recurs, and he turns to stare at the door with his pulse beating against his throat. He doesn’t think anyone unpleasant knows he’s in America, let alone an old house in Maine, but he approaches the door with undue caution all the same. He doesn’t need to get shot by a slighted client before he can wallow proper in the misery of empty bedrooms and hollow kitchens.

On the other side of the peephole stands a woman, dark hair framing a face that’s cut with a wide frown, and he stares back in no little surprise. She's dressed like she lives here, in a tank and short cut-offs despite the chill, and sports no weapons that his usual enemies might have clipped at their belts.

The only other option is just unlikely – it’s a small island, but busy enough with tourists that no one  _should_  have noticed him arrive, let alone cared to follow him. He wishes to do nothing more than ignore the visitor, but another hard knock prompts him to turn the knob, pulling the door open with no little hesitancy.

The stranger lifts her chin, shoving a hand forward in through the door at the moment it’s wide enough, keeping it from going closed as she steps up. “I’m Yuuko Andewn. I live across the street.”

“Dr. Armitage Hux,” he responds, grudgingly taking a step back and unsure what to do with such a forward visitor. He itches to shut the door across her arm and over her feet, but she could be law enforcement, for all he knows, and he’s recently had enough trouble with them to last a lifetime.

“I was hoping to find out how you got in,” Andewn says, dropping her hand back to her side after he refuses to take it, then glancing past him with a long look down the dark hall. Her eyes linger on his bag a long moment before turning back up, narrowing into accusation.

Hux feels a thread of unease crawl up his throat, and hardens his voice as consequence, “This is my house.”

Andewn slowly shakes her head, undeterred as a wry grimace crosses her mouth. “I take care of this house, sir. I know it’s not yours.”

“I am married to the owner, Ms. Andewn,” Hux says, reflexively swallowing against his own discomfort, so unused to acknowledging it this often within only days. He’s avoided even thinking about it, at least while sober, and now he’s signing papers and announcing it to strangers. “Five years in… in June. I think that makes it mine enough.”

Andewn blinks in surprise, leaning back on her sandaled heels and glancing down Hux for a skeptical moment. She takes a deep breath, “Is Ren okay?”

Hux doesn’t answer for a long moment, then settles for honesty. “No.”

Andewn’s face falls, a short exhale passing her lips. “Has he… passed away?”

“No,” Hux repeats, molars grinding down against each other.

“Oh,” Andewn intones, blinking a few times at the tone. She glances sideways for a moment before looking back up with a reluctant smile, “That’s good. I just assumed he was busy, being some kind of professor – I didn’t know he was  _sick_.”

Hux gives a tight smile, glancing again out the door behind her; he needs her to go so he can think for five silent fucking minutes. He didn’t come here to  _converse_  with the effects of Ren’s secrets, only to suffer in the echoing silence of his own ignorance; his stolen future.

“Well, I’ll – “ Andewn takes a deep breath, glancing backward over her shoulder, then looking back to Hux with a furrowed brow. “Do you need anything?”

“No,” Hux says flatly, quieting an urge to request her never to look or speak to him.

“He’s paying me like twelve grand a year to… do nothing,” Andewn continues, shrugging with an awkward gesture at the house and property. “I figured I should ask.”

Hux nods slowly, realizing suddenly that between a mortgage, taxes, paying this…  _groundskeeper,_ Ren has been spending an exorbitant amount on this place without ever once enjoying it. “Of course he is.”

“Anyway, it’s good to meet you Mr. Hux – ”

“Doctor.” Hux corrects under his breath.

“Sorry, Dr. Hux,” Andewn says, nodding quickly and taking a half-step back out the door and onto the porch, a wince in her expression like she’s only now realizing how cross he is with her presence. “I hope we get to talk more. Maybe with Mr. Organa next time.”

“Maybe,” Hux says, curling his hand around the door. He doesn’t strictly slam it in her face, but it’s a close thing, an abrupt turn on her heel all he sees before the door shuts firmly closed on the jamb.

The silence that falls over the house is almost more oppressive now with something to compare. He takes a slow breath before glancing sideways to a wide window and out toward the sprawl of the sea; a few islands dot far off into the distance, even smaller specks of boats and skiffs, and something in him aches, a pain lancing down the center of his chest.

He looks down before he can think on it any further, taking his bag onto his shoulder again and continuing further into the house. The upstairs is slightly less empty, with a pair of bed frames in respective rooms, a single chest of drawers and a disturbing painting of an angry wolf gutting a deer decorating the hall. He finds himself pausing in what must be the master, between the en suite and the view, and collapses onto the bench of the bay window facing the sea. The glass is warm against his back, sun lighting up the barren room wall-to-wall, and soon he’s pulling out the letters that he’s been avoiding since he left Skywalker at the solicitor’s office.

The few he's already seen are set aside, the urge to look over them again ignored. He needs to get this over with as soon as possible, to read if Ren denounces him or blames him, or both.

_Hux,_

_It's been seven months, they tell me, and one over my sentence into forced therapy. I think they're realizing how much it's not working. I’ve tried to hide it, but I can’t anymore – everyone here thinks too much and too little._

_One of the nurses is pregnant, another has a grandmother with cancer, the patient in the room next to me is convinced they have a brain tumor. I think my new ‘doctor’ murdered someone at his last hospital, but it might’ve just been metaphorical. He thinks about it a lot – if he’s a murderer, will the baby be, too? I’ve thought about it. My grandfather and his condition, my condition. It’s fucked up. If only I’d been born normal. It would’ve saved both of us a lot of trouble._

_A normal life, even. I wonder what that could’ve been like._

_\- Ren_

Hux folds back the paper with a grimace, slowly creasing out the edges with his thumb. Ren must have written this before he found a way to mute everyone, or so said, because this sounds as rambling as he used to get when ill-advisedly drunk. He could go on for hours about his colorful genetic history, blaming anything and everything of his life on it, though previously Hux wasn’t counted as an affected party.

He sighs, drawing the pad of his finger down the other two envelopes, and wondering if he should wait, maybe get something to drink first, preferably alcoholic. He doesn’t even have  _cigarettes_  – Skywalker had thrown them out on entirely false basis of US regulation changes. He doesn’t even know if there’s a place to buy goods out here, or if he’d need to take the overlong ferry back to the mainland.

He picks up next letter, twisting it between his fingers, then tears at the seal before he can ruminate longer.

_A,_

_I might stay here forever. They keep trying to put me in some program that would allow me to leave, an out patient treatment meant to reintegrate myself for society. I don’t see the point. I was hardly ever fit for society._

_I'm too tall and too angry and too weird. I never shut up and I never know when to stop. I wish these assholes would keep to their word and just **tell**  me how to be normal._

_- ~~R~~ Ben_

Hux swallows hard, rereading the letter and wondering how long it took for Ren to become so aimless, so despondent. A few months, perhaps, or even less than that; it couldn’t have been more than it took himself. 

The last envelope is more crumpled than the rest, his name in stark capitals like Ren never used, and the letter inside even less typical. It has a tear at the corner, an outspread stain of graphite smearing along the sides with a few perfect shapes of finger prints, and Hux ignores the impulse to place his thumb over the same place. He's not quite to a romance novel level of overwrought; isn't sure he's even capable of it, though the fact he thought about it at all is probably a bad sign.

_A,_

_I never told you, but I always pretended it was real. On the bad days I remember that the next time I see you, you'll be carrying papers. Maybe it will be a lawyer, nervously patting their brow among my fellow nutcases. I’ll see an image in their mind of someone you got to choose, who has no temper and needs no keeper, and they'll be holding your hand like I never got to._

_Your hands were so clever compared to mine. I used to watch you work on those wires and joints, bringing them to life with such ease. You’d reach across to grab a tool and I'd feel weighted from a simple brush, your thin shoulder nudging into mine. I try to carry every careful touch with me when I feel too isolated, not simply the lustful ones as I might have months ago._

_You’ll never know much I ached for those old moments of idleness, laying in bed after another unlikely fuck I thought would be the last and simply feeling, sharing the same small space. It never lasted long enough, I wanted to just stay. I wanted it to feel real for that much longer._

_Do you remember when we went skiing and I shoved that asshole into a tree? Or when you had me pose as one of your students just to stage a fit? I’ve told the psychiatrist about them. She finds nothing as funny as you. We were complementary. Even stuck in this hospital, I can’t help but hope that you’ll realize we’re suited for each other._

_I used to wait and wait for you to file papers, to shove them under my nose at dinner, or in the lab, or some early morning. I dreaded it. I hope you send a lawyer. I don't think I’m capable anymore of bearing that revelation in person._

_-B._

The hollow, aching pain is probably just a sign that Hux’s heart has stopped when he reaches the end, the paper nearly tearing in his hands and crinkling in his haste to put it back before he can do something he'll regret, like throw it out the window. He stares at the crumple of it once he’s stuffed it firmly in the envelope, swallowing panic balling up at the base of his throat. At least now he knows what Ren had expected from the visit; why he had looked up to find Hux and immediately told him he shouldn’t have come.

The Senator had been right – Hux was little more than a conniving bloodsucker. 

He’d been so… so  _satisfied_  with the way it was, continuing to research and work because of his scheme, indulging the occasional intimacies with someone convenient. He had known Ren felt  _some_ thing, but snubbed it for limitless excuses of his own making, always kicking Ren out of his bed or refusing to socialize, and for what? It didn’t save him from the misery after finding out Ren was never coming home, or feeling hollow now whenever he wakes up in a new place and remembers it. He still crossed an ocean just for a chance to see Ren again, is now standing in a house bought over two  _years_  ago, lingering at dusty corners and wishing he wasn’t alone.

He tries to imagine, just for a moment, they had moved up here without trouble - without  _Snoke._  The lab would technically be in that boathouse, but projects would still be strewn across the house as they had been in the apartment, and with more room to think, to innovate - he  _might_  have eventually indulged Ren and allowed them to sleep in the same room, in the same bed. He would wake to soft breathing and warm hands, turn over for an indulgent morning, or to shove Ren out to start the coffee so Hux doesn't accidentally drink synthesizing paracetamol, again; the once irksome heat at his side slowly growing more and more comforting with the onset of colder seasons. He wants to think it would’ve worked out, leveled off into restful perpetuity, if with a few complaints from neighbors when their arguments got too loud.

He hadn’t married Ren expecting it to last longer than the mandated eighteen months, or for it to become favorable to any other future, but somewhere along the way he’d… he got so attached that it feels like he’s going to be coveting it forever. Even now, with years of separation dulled into a chronic ache, what he misses most is Ren just  _existing_.

Hux looks down at the letters in his hands, physical proof writ in plain ink of his senselessness, and realizes that he’s going back. Probably tonight, maybe tomorrow, but definitely before Ren has to mark off another week. He even longs to give into the foolishness he knows is deep in his own chest, though it’s likely too little, far too late. Ren may, and likely should, turn him away, but at the very least Ren would be out. He just isn’t  _alive_  in there, playing at a shadow in the corner of a room, slowly wasting away into nothing as the world goes on without him.

* * *

 The receptionist is even more suspicious this morning when Hux walks in, eyes darting up and down his person with recognition. They steel their expression as he settles in front of the partition, borderline hostile, and he wonders if somehow the Senator had found out about his visit, crafting a memo that twisted into a warning what had happened two years ago. 

“I’m here to sign the release for Dr. Ben Organa,” Hux says, lifting his chin and ignoring an impulse to fold his hands at his back. He needs to look like he’s official here, but not a caricature of it.

The receptionist’s expression thaws somewhat with surprise. “The release?”

“Yes, I will be taking him home,” Hux says, nodding shortly and glancing with a mild significance toward the separating door. He wonders if Ren is awake; if he’s even allowed to leave his room; if he’s had any autonomy over his life in the last two years.

The receptionist takes a short breath, glancing to the computer and behind their own back, then finally returning to Hux with apprehension folding at their mouth. “I-I don’t think you can – “

“I have legal conservatorship over Ben, which means I am legally allowed to –” Hux pauses briefly, realizing too late that ‘ _do what I want with him’_  is not an especially wise thing to say, as well as the fact he probably should’ve taken a nap before trying to bluff through legal technicalities. “Do what I deem best for him.”

“Yes, but that doesn't mean you can bypass procedure,” the receptionist says, haughty attitude returning with a decidedly rude scoff under their breath. “We have a set way of doing things here at SKB. Like most hospitals.”

“I know you must be aware of who Ren is,” Hux says, narrowing his eyes. He waits for the receptionist to confirm the assumption with a self-directed grimace, then leans in toward the counter with his entire body, keeping his voice purposely low, “If you don’t release him, I will have a lawyer down here in under an hour, an auditor peeking into your records, a third party physician to look at all your ‘ways of doing things’… And by the end of it all, I  _will_  have my husband. I'm not sure the same can be said for your job.”

The receptionist is silent for a moment, opens their mouth, only to close it again and reach for the phone. They glance up just as it connects, making eye contact with Hux, then pointedly clear their throat. “Dr Figgis? Yes, Ben Organa’s husband would like to check him out without the –  _yes_ , his husband.”

The person on the other end is unintelligible through the speaker, but it prompts the receptionist to roll their eyes to the end of their cubicle. They nod a few times, “Yes, I know, but standard procedure is – oh, I wasn't… is he? A  _year_  ago?”

Hux shifts back with a frown as the receptionist reaches out with a quick hand to press at something that renders their box mute, forcing Hux to attempt at lip reading before quickly giving up. He's fairly certain conversation is heading in his favor, though – at least judging by the increasingly violent hand gestures at Ren’s presumed doctor on the other side of the line.

The receptionist finally gives a reluctant nod, eyes darting to Hux and then down to the computer, a hand slowly rising to the keyboard; they nod again, now typing something in, a curling frown at their lips. The call goes on for a few more long minutes, clearly devolving into another argument that lasts even longer, but soon the phone is back on its hook and the receptionist is leaning forward to press the button, expression surly. “Please wait while I gather your husband’s effects.”

“Thank you,” Hux says, trying to force an affable tone and absolutely certain it comes out more ugly.

The receptionist disappears into and then remerges from the door at the back with a plastic tote in one arm and a veritable ream of paper under the other, their expression now fallen into a stony sulk. They slam the tote down at their side, then lean forward to slide open the window to shove the paper through; it has Ren’s name scrawled at the top.

“Please sign these documents to state that you, Armitage Hux, will not hold any care of the patient, Ben Organa, from this date, April 7 2017, to be the responsibility of SKB Memorial Hospital,” the receptionist recites, a marked boredom audible in their tone even behind the lingering resentment of the past fifteen minutes. They continue highlighting areas of signature, turning the pages on an impressive packet of words Hux should probably be spending more than twelve seconds reading. “And sign here to confirm that you, Armitage Hux, are now holding conservatorship for the patient, Ben Organa, for full-time care as instated by his legal council on October 12 2015.”

Hux feels his brows slowly go up, flipping through the pages with a few fingers and trying to read through more of the legalese without his sleep-deprived mind collapsing into dust. He should’ve become a lawyer rather than a roboticist.

“Normally, Dr Figgis would insist on an outgoing review and appointment setting at this phase; however…” The receptionist pauses for a moment, as if considering their words, then sighs heavily and leans down to pick the tote back up, rising with a grimace across their face. “He told me that some time ago he declared Ben Organa to be at the end of our facilities treatment cycle. Obviously, Mr. Organa is still free to seek further patient treatment should he feel that Dr Figgis is in the wrong.”

“Ah,” Hux intones, glancing down and signing a few more of the highlighted spaces. He tries not to wonder if the Senator knows about that particular development, or how much she’d done to fight the no-visit order when she found out. 

The receptionist gives an odd, almost embarrassed cough, leaning in to their speaker as if that might make it more discreet. “Dr Figgis did not  _explicitly_  state this, but I believe he has always found it difficult to treat Ben due to his high intelligence and… and intimate knowledge of pharmaceutical chemistry.”

“I’m trying to contain my surprise,” Hux mutters, wondering what he's going to say next even as he keeps on speaking – he shouldn't have had that energy shot. “Ren is –  _Ben_  is difficult to work with as a colleague, let alone a patient.”

“Are you a scientist, too?” The receptionist asks, sliding the window up again and taking the papers, carelessly throwing them to the desk and turning toward the security door.

“Yes,” Hux says, tucking his arms back to his sides and hesitantly shuffling sideways, feeling almost like he’s watching the tote more than the receptionist. He wonders what might be stuffed under the bursting lid; he can’t even remember what Ren been arrested in. He’d thought that morning Ren was just going to the campus - that he would be coming home. 

The door opens and the receptionist thrusts out the tote, jaw tight, “I apologize for the difficulty, Dr. Hux. You can find Ben in 188.”

Hux stares at the tote for a long moment, then slowly looks up, “Are you not going to escort me?”

“The staff and security are aware you’re here,” the receptionist says, shoving the tote forward again with marked impatience. “If you get lost, feel free to ask for assistance. Most of the patients aren’t awake at this time, so you shouldn’t run into any of them.”

Hux reluctantly takes the tote, nearly falling forward, and grimaces at the realization that it must have Ren’s damned boots inside to weigh so much. He lingers a few moments longer, waiting to be told their security  _isn't_  actually such a joke, staring at the receptionist as they hold the door open. “Pass?”

“You stole the last one,” the receptionist says, eyes narrowing into an actual glare; their dislike for Hux may actually have very little to do with Ren. “You’re not getting another.”

Hux nods slowly, pausing for a tense moment before turning and choosing to let the argument at the tip of his tongue simmer rather than boil over. He shuffles through the open door and finds himself back in that hallway, clean and bright and curiously unfriendly, readjusting the weight of the tote in his arms as he looks around for any sort of sign, even a fire drill map.

A passing nurse pauses on a heel with an incredulous look, turning at the waist to reach out with a careful hand and just nearly touch at Hux's shoulder, as if to check that he's real. “You the one here for Organa?”

“Yes,” Hux says, glancing over them; they look like the one who dragged him out of the recreation room.

A conspicuous silence passes, the nurse narrowing their eyes for a short moment before letting up and stepping back. “Two halls down is the patient wing,” they mutter, passing Hux at his right and nearly checking him at the shoulder. “He should be awake. Good luck.”

Hux ignores an impulse for sarcasm, taking a deep breath and stepping forward, one foot after the other until he's in front of a beige door with a neat  ** _188 - Organa_** on the placard. The other rooms each have little bits of subtle personality, from stripes of simple color to drawings from presumed family, yet Ren’s is plain if for a spot of faded paint just near the handle from repeated opening by overlarge hands.

Hux takes a deep breath and slowly sets the tote down at his feet, rubbing hard at his dry, tired eyes and trying not to wish for sleep. He kneels just next to the tote and wrenches it open with some difficulty, peering inside if just to confirm his suspicions: steel-toed leather boots, size far too big. His breath catches slightly at sight of a glimmer just near a toe, and he's reaching in before he can think better of it. Silver and matte black, it's nothing particularly personal, but it is the puzzle ring Hux had gotten Ren after he'd shown up with this ridiculous spinning gear ring that Hux can't seem to let go. He turns it over in his hand, tracing along alternating bands that culminate into an impressive pattern of lines at the front.

Who buys a four-hundred-dollar ring for a VISA-fraud husband? Dr Armitage Hux, apparently, when delusional as ever.

He pockets the ring and lifts his hand, hesitating a moment more before gently rapping at the metal door. The sound seems almost to echo across the entire building, ratcheting tension up his spine and making him feel a fool as he glances up and down the hall.

“No,” Ren responds, his tone flat and hollow through the door. “Go away.”

Hux rolls his eyes, looking sideways for a completely different reason now as he falls back into a years old exasperation. He is glad, at least, that he doesn't have to announce himself. “ _Organa_.”

“This is a private hospital,” Ren says, still disagreeable, but his voice is closer, loud enough now that he might be just on the other side.

“It seems your doctor approved you for release months ago,” Hux says, leaning into the door and trying to keep from raising his voice, careful of disturbing the other patients who are probably still asleep at this hour. “So either you open the door, or I’m finding someone who can.”

The door remains staidly closed and Hux leans forward, raising his hand to knock again, only to nearly fall in when it swings open to reveal Ren on the other side. He drops his hand to his side, taking a breath and forcing himself to stand straight, meeting Ren eye for eye.

Ren holds the stare, quiet, then slowly exhales, “What?”

“I've signed your release papers,” Hux says, forcibly uncurling his fists before the grip can turn bloody in his palms. “That's what you get for putting me in charge of your  _life_.”

Ren seems visibly startled, shifting back a step, though he could be just letting Hux in by the way he turns toward the inside of the room.

Hux looks backward for a moment, down at the tote, then slowly steps in further, door closing behind him with a soft puff of air and quiet click of the latch into the jamb. The inside of the room is beige and plain, featuring most prominently a wooden bed visibly held to the floor; a bureau stands just to his left near a door that might be a closet or an en suite. It looks, in all, a bit like an economy hotel room without any awful bargain art.

“You just have to take control of everything, don't you?”

Hux feels a tic pull at his jaw, looking over to catch Ren’s eyes again only to find him now evasive. His posture is stiffer under that ugly neutral jumper, but otherwise he remains ostensibly emotionless when he should be snarling, getting up in Hux’s face with anger. The way he looks now is as if Hux had accidentally trodden on his foot getting to the toilet, rather than abruptly taken control of his mental health services.

“Is the FBI making you get me out now?” Ren asks, eyes momentarily flaring to life before going vacant again, blinking slowly, “I don't know anything – not about Snoke, or – ”

“They don't even know I'm here,” Hux interrupts, ignoring a compulsion to try and get a real fight out of Ren rather than suffer his borderline professionalism – he hasn’t suffered this version of aggressively fake politeness since they were strangers, and even that had only lasted a few minutes. “I came on my own.”

Ren narrows his eyes, his head tilting only slightly with suspicion, likely meaning it must be twisting deep in his mind by the fact he’s shown it at all. “I don’t believe you. You never visited before.”

“The Senator hid your whereabouts from me,” Hux snaps, indignation blooming at the back of his mind and making him forget to be cautious.

“The courts could have told you,” Ren says, his short exhale audible in the silent room – and undeniably derisive, which is almost a relief. “You probably didn’t even ask.”

Hux narrows his eyes for a long moment, then sighs slowly as annoyance mixes with old shame, looking past Ren and toward the window. He can see a few trees shading the room from the early morning sun, a garden stretching out to a man-made pond; it’s an oddly calming scene.

“Reception informed me your doctor officially declared your in-patient treatment here at an end,” he says, looking back to Ren with new resolve. “ _Months_  ago, Ren. Why are you still here?”

Ren takes a heavy breath, moving with an awkward hesitance and sitting down on his pale bedspread. He looks far too big for it, even in this state of perpetual hunching. “That doctor barely earned his degree. He doesn't know recovery.”

“A nurse gave me your letters, as well,” Hux continues, forcing a self-assured tone even he can't quite believe, finding himself biting hard at his lip for a quick, painful instant. “And they weren't from a place of recovering, Ren. They were words of a man stagnating.”

Ren takes a visibly startled breath, almost a laugh, his hands tightening on the bedspread. It seems the notion that he hadn't expected Hux to ever see them is true, but it's not enough for Hux to now feel regret at reading them.

“Look at me,” Hux says, reaching out and carefully taking Ren’s chin with a pair of knuckles, forcing him to look up. “Can you even convince  _yourself_  that you’re in here for legitimate mental health? The symptom that gives you the most trouble isn’t even truly psychosis – you really  _can_  read minds.”

Ren actually holds his eyes for a few moments, something like regret flickering across his mouth before it locks down again into something completely unreadable. He pulls away from Hux’s hand with a soft scratch of beard against fingertips, shifting further away on the edge of the bed with a look away.

Hux hesitates before budging forward again into Ren’s space, though now keeps from outright touching him. He’s rewarded with a quick glance upward after only a few seconds of silence, and he takes the short opportunity with a hasty breath, going for the most wallowing honesty. “Please just come home?”

The reaction that plays out across Ren’s face is mildly alarming: wide, disbelieving eyes, a visible tightening of his jaw. He looks up at Hux like it’s some sort of trick, a pained sort of melancholy twisting his mouth into a physical frown.

“It wasn’t all awful,” Hux says, regretting for the tenth time this morning that he’s on less than four hours of sleep and didn’t even think to rehearse this aside from ‘get Ren back’. He’d just had his little pity party in a big empty house, probably inhaling all sorts of mold, and assumed it would go his way – he was acting like what he always accused of Ren. “I very much liked being married to you, even if it didn’t seem like it.”

“Yeah?” Ren murmurs, eyes narrowing with lingering suspicion.

“I didn’t realize you were so unhappy,” Hux continues, swallowing hard and forcing himself to keep Ren’s lasering gaze. He can hear something crack as he shifts his jaw. “I… I  _apologize_ , Ren.”

“Oh,” Ren intones, his eyebrows slowly going up with disbelief.

“And, I…” Hux traces the ring in his pocket before pulling it out – the size of it feels ridiculous now in the center of his palm. He hesitates another moment before turning over his hand, practically shoving it under Ren’s nose. “I am not averse to a restructuring of our relationship.”

Ren looks down, breath hitching at the sight of his old ring, fingers curling together at his lap with apparent hesitation. The silence stretches long, even more uncomfortable and heavy than moments earlier.

“I understand if you no longer feel that way about me,” Hux says, forcing the words out as an anxiety sets on the subject. He’s avoided thinking about that for far longer than the hours since he’d read the letters, though he has since become much less naïve. He knows how unlikely it is Ren  _found_  someone in here, but… whatever feelings he had may have faded; he could be obsessive, yes, but also rather mercurial.

Ren is still for a tense moment longer, then slowly lifts his hand to take the ring. He rolls it between his fingers, seeming to concentrate on it for a long few seconds, then looks back up to catch Hux in a stare. “Better than your last one. Proposal, I mean.”

Hux rolls his eyes, trying to ignore the little bubble of elation swelling in his chest. “I suppose.”

“Still detached,” Ren says, speaking slowly and tipping his head, a glinting look in his eyes, “But that just means you’re scared.”

Hux glares back, feeling his jaw grind with words better left unsaid. Ren is clearly on some delicate precipice here, and he knows that, but that doesn’t make him any less of an utter  _asshole_.

“Restructuring,” Ren says, taking a deep breath and sliding the ring onto his finger with a short turn of his knuckles. “Does that just mean you won’t kick me out after?”

“If you’re good,” Hux says, reflexively sarcastic; the narrow look he receives has him taking a breath and wincing, mortified at his own tactlessness. “No, it… I – I did miss you quite a lot. It probably means anything at this moment.”

Ren visibly hesitates, glancing around and to the side, dragging his teeth down along his lip. “You could just let me kiss you sometimes? Not like, leading to anything, but – if I feel like it.”

Hux stares, aware each moment is another tick toward Ren crawling back into that appalling shell, but he still feels his skin crawl with second hand embarrassment at such utter…  _schmaltz_. His voice is awkward when he finally finds a response, almost unsteady, “I can’t promise I won’t get irritated if you’re only being a bother.”

Ren’s mouth pinches into a frown, more familiarly petulant than really hurt. He stands up in the next moment, revealing himself to still contain some of that legendary temper as his voice raises with his restless posture. “I just want to be able to do it. To know you won't tell me I’m just a stand-in.”

“I never even  _thought_ that,” Hux snaps, a sneer growing on his lips. He’s not quite sure how offended he should feel – it is something he might have  _said_ , but it wouldn’t have been anything more serious than a cruel joke. He takes a step forward, gesturing down Ren’s form, “It’s not as if I was ever going to find some other idiot with bad impulse control to dupe into a VISA scheme.”

Ren stares at him for a long moment, the silence heavy, then takes a half step closer. “I'm going to – “

In the next moment, Hux finds himself caught in an outright hug, half-frozen and feeling awkward for it. He forces his own arms up, curling woodenly around Ren’s back; he is thinner, but still so big, wider than Hux and twice as warm, and this sentimentality is really getting out of control.

“This is the last thing I expected from you,” Ren mutters, his voice fleetingly regaining that nasty edge. “Your life must be really shitty now.”

Hux rolls his eyes, shaking his head into the side of Ren’s neck. He should have shaved, he’s sure his two-day old stubble doesn’t feel quite as forgiving as Ren’s usual disheveled goatee.

“Do they still have my old clothes?”

“And boots,” Hux says, forcing himself to shove off of Ren’s chest. He doesn't think they’ve ever just  _held_ each other before, especially not so chastely, and the longing to stay close is both startling and overwhelming; he needs to move back before he forgets how. He runs a hand through his hair, “I left it all just outside.”

Ren stares for a short moment that seems close to rolling his eyes, until he just looks past Hux with a flattening of his mouth. “They’re not going to fit.”

“They’ll fit fine,” Hux mutters, pulling the door open and looking down at said plastic container, realizing suddenly that it had been so heavy because of Ren’s obnoxious boots. “You’ve not wasted away quite that much.”

“Are they really just going to let you take me?” Ren says, taking the tote from Hux and putting it on his sad little bureau. He doesn’t even have a book or a notepad.

“There was mention of some sort of off-boarding process,” Hux admits, sitting down on the stiff bed, grimacing at the lumpy texture of the bedspread. “But I threatened to sue.”

Ren begins immediately to change, tearing off his pale, ill-fitted hospital clothes, reaching for the box and snapping the lid open. “For what?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” Hux admits, leaning back on his hands and watching Ren pull on his black jumper. He’s not as unhealthy as it had seemed on first look, just with less diet control, less obsessive workout.

“Why are you staring,” Ren mutters, his voice flat but somehow still sneering, leaning down now to lace up his boots, “Feeling narcissistic?”

Hux rolls his eyes; well, now he’s just feeling irritated. Honestly, for the first time, Ren actually  _looks_  like a world-renowned biochemist, not some meathead jock out to scare the rest of the nerds. If he goes back to work, maybe he’ll actually make friends with everyone he used to intimidate.

Ren makes a peculiar noise, then pulls out a mess of balled cord from the bottom of the box. The charm is obvious despite being tangled within its own fasteners – a bright red leviathan cross.

“Good lord,” Hux mutters, feeling a grimace twist at his lips and watching as the cheap cord is slowly unwound, “Couldn’t they have gotten rid of that?”

“You gave it to me,” Ren says, looping it over his neck. It stands out as the single spot of color on him. “For sulfur.”

“For a  _joke_ ,” Hux says, heaving a sigh and shoving off of the bed. He reaches up with a certain senseless fluttering at the back of his throat, picking up the cross and tucking it into Ren’s shirt; he has to step back before his hand tries to linger. “A bad one.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ren doesn't seem to notice, quiet and perhaps thoughtful, only opening his mouth once the car is outside the hospital campus. “Are we just going home?”
> 
> Hux finds himself blinking in surprise at the question, tightening his hands on the wheel as he resists a reflex to snarl at the road – he hasn’t had a home in years. “Maine, actually. Since you bought a house.”
> 
> Ren goes silent again for a few blocks, only the soft beat of fingers audible against his knee. “I was going to say something,”

The hospital is disturbingly easy to leave once the process is started - a signature from Ren, a confirmation from Hux of his paperwork, and reception now oddly eager to get Ren out now that they're looking at his face. It would almost be suspicious if Hux had the room in his mind to care, still mentally ticking off boxes and so close to finishing off the greater part of the list. 

Ren doesn't seem to notice, quiet and perhaps thoughtful, only opening his mouth once the car is outside the hospital campus. “Are we just going home?”

Hux finds himself blinking in surprise at the question, tightening his hands on the wheel as he resists a reflex to snarl at the road – he hasn’t had a home in years. “Maine, actually. Since you bought a _house_.”

Ren goes silent again for a few blocks, only the soft beat of fingers audible against his knee. “I was going to say something,”

“Oh,” Hux mutters, rolling his eyes to the side for the scant second it takes to stop at the sign. “I’m sure you were.”

“I didn’t buy it that long before…” Ren shakes his head, taking a long breath that leads to a short slump in his seat. “I was just looking at stuff and saw it.”

“You just happened to be looking up listings in Maine, how  _likely_ ,” Hux says, diverting his far-too-late irritation at Ren’s impulses to glaring down a driver that seems to be thinking about pulling in front of him. He looks back to the signal coming up soon, mouth curling further downward. “The ferry is walk-on only, did you know? I had to leave this hire car behind hoping no one would steal it.”

“It’s a nice house,” Ren mutters, his voice both quiet and petulant. “On the ocean. You like the ocean.”

Hux exhales slowly, stretching his shoulders back into the seat for a long moment. He can already feel panicked breath filling his lungs until his ribs pull tense at his spine, and that's only at the  _thought_  of opening that door with Ren next to him.

Ren shifts his hand, wrapping it now around the door handle. “Did you move all my old stuff up? Like my weights – I’m going to need them.”

“No,” Hux says, trying to ignore an old melancholy even as it hollows his chest, irrational parts of his mind refusing to reconcile that Ren is literally next to him.

“So it’s still at the apartment?” Ren asks, speaking slower with some edge of dissatisfaction.

Hux drags his teeth sharp along his lower lip and keeps his emergent glare on a peeling bumper sticker. He had somehow forgotten entirely that this would be an issue; he was so used to Ren just _knowing_ things. The fact that might’ve had more to do with them in each other’s pockets, than his weird and mysterious telepathy, hadn’t quite occurred in any real capacity until now suffering the actual conversation.

“Seriously?” Ren asks, his tone coloring with offense and no little hurt. “What happened – did you just sell it?”

“Your mother told me to leave the country or she would file a lawsuit,” Hux bites out, less shocked than he should be that they’ve already fallen into squabbling not ten minutes out. He looks over to Ren just as he hits the brake into a lurching stop, catching dark eyes and finding them bitter, “I was in no place to argue for the ownership rights of anything, let alone your overpriced weight rack, with ICE dogging at my heels for bloody  _fraud_.”

Ren looks down and away in a shamed instant, twisting his ring between his knuckles and fumbling it off in a familiar frustration that is almost difficult to watch. He breaks the shape of it in practiced motion, turning it into pieces, “Oh.”

Hux tolerates the silence for a few minutes, letting frustration churn in his mind like rushing water, until it becomes almost unbearably heavy with realization of his own pettiness; he didn't just threaten a hospital to dwell on the years of regret – he can resume that later. “How did you  _lose_  weight in there, anyway? I thought side effects was why you worked out so obsessively.”

Ren grunts, tipping his head back and forth as he works to fit the ring back into layered shape. “Took me off it.”

“Abusively?” Hux asks, feeling a startlingly compelling urge to go back and kick that shirty receptionist’s teeth into sparkling shards.

“Not like that,” Ren mutters, making eye-contact with a short glance up, then shrugging; a smirk flashes over his face, if just for an instant. He clears his throat, looking back down, “Kind of, actually. From me. A new doctor decided all my problems had to do with medications after I told him about my research.”

Hux manages to reduce his exasperation to a sigh at the windscreen. The fact a licensed medical professional would see fit to a full stop isn’t particularly a surprise, especially if Ren exaggerated an already colorful truth. Hux doesn’t like to think about what they might say about  _him_.

Ren exhales with a short huff, still toying with the ring and flipping pieces into pieces within the curl of his palm, “Took over a year to taper off. The experience… bad, but probably not as much as if the voices I heard were actually schizophrenia.”

“I thought you were muted, or however you put it,” Hux says, remembering the quiet admission from… Good Lord, had it only been two days ago? It’s felt like a week. “Unable to do that anymore.”

Ren is silent for a long few moments, then exhales slowly just as the last slice of the ring clicks back into proper form. “I don’t know.”

“Do you think you’re losing it?” Hux asks, tightening his hands around the leather wheel, feeling the seam catch on his palms. The ability had taken weeks for Hux to take serious, months to really believe, but it was something Ren had been suffering with  _literally_  his entire life.

“I need to eat,” Ren announces, ignoring the question and sliding the ring back onto his finger, leaning on the window. He shifts forward a moment later, tapping at the glass, “There’s a diner.”

Hux glances in the same direction, reluctantly following the pointing to find a dilapidated strip mall and an advertised ‘ _American Homestyle_ ’ restaurant. It is apparently vaguely on the corner, a sign crumbling along a faded yellow overhang against the roof that is more menacing than welcoming. “Not if you’d just come back from the  _dead_.”

Ren makes a frustrated noise, low in his throat. “I’ll pay.”

“You don’t even have a credit card,” Hux scoffs, glancing through the corner of his eye only to catch Ren folding open his old wallet. “Do you?”

Ren shrugs with a tiny shift of a shoulder, pulling out a disorderly wad of cash. “I have a couple of twenties before I went crazy.”

Hux feels a renewed twist of guilt, the sensation simmering low and nauseating in his stomach as he slowly changes lanes. The traffic signal is long, keeping on until he suffers a recovery of something that might be humor when he realizes his own behavior, narrowly looking sideways, “ _You’re_  trying to manipulate  _me_.”

“Payback,” Ren says, blinking back with another quick flash of a smirk. The indifference act seems to be falling apart quickly now, which is some stretch between a relief and almost worse – it's unclear what could happen after it’s completely gone. Will Ren be more similar to himself, or the wreck as he was just after the incident?

Hux mulls over another moment, then taps the blinker on with a low sigh. He hasn’t technically eaten since yesterday, anyway, nothing aside from an aged PowerBar and twelve or so cups of coffee.

The parking lot is near-empty despite the morning hour, and he parks between a pair of early-noughties SUVs that may have actually crashed into each other at some point. He stares at the steering wheel for a moment, tracing out the seam with his thumb, then shakes his head and unbuckles his belt, hoping that –

“Wait,” Ren says, reaching out and grabbing the sleeve of Hux’s shirt in a tense grip; his eyes are narrowed, suddenly piercing and dark with something heavy. He slowly unclips his own belt, then shifts forward over the center console, pulling Hux in the same instant and grabbing the back of his neck to drag him forward into a kiss.

Hux is shocked for a long moment, then moves just as it feels like Ren is pulling back, reaching up with both hands and holding him around the jaw, digging his fingers into sharp cheeks. The tightness in his chest is back, threatening to blow up and burst behind his ribs – the letters, the rings, the  _house_. He wasn't lying, and despite what popular opinion might be, he had lost so much more than a research position two years ago.

“I can't believe you're really here,” Ren gasps, eyes intense as he stares hard into Hux, hands clutching loosely at his arm and nape, “You wouldn't even let me stay in your room overnight. Or sit too close on the couch. Or just kiss you.”

“I know,” Hux agrees, no less reluctant for it now than he was back at the hospital. He leans in to Ren’s furrowed brow, forcing himself into holding that overwrought gaze. “I was cruel; I was stupid. I already said I'm sorry.”

“You should record it,” Ren says solemnly, because even the best psychiatry couldn't cure him of being a bastard. He pulls away just slightly, eyelashes perceptible as he presses hesitating kisses across Hux's cheek.

“I still don't like PDA, or cuddling, or – ” Hux gasps, feeling teeth dig in under his jaw, taking a hard left out of idle snogging territory. “Or clichés. It's so awkward.”

“You thing, not fuckbuddy thing,” Ren says, a hand curling along Hux’s ribs, thumb moving in slow circles at  _exactly_  the right place, working him up like he hasn't been years. An overlarge nose digs in under Hux’s ear with a deep inhale, lips brushing against his neck, “I got it. You hate affection.”

“It sounds awful like that,” Hux mutters, shifting Ren’s attention up and dragging him into another kiss, sloppier than the last and feeling almost more  _real_  for it. He has half a thought to climb over in the other seat, or even attempt dragging Ren into his lap, uncaring for the fact they're both far too large for it.

A discordant bang abruptly vibrates through the car, and Hux nearly loses his lip to a sharp depression of teeth. He forgets himself and boxes Ren at the ear just as he shoves him away, rubbing hard at the stinging sensation with his other hand.

“What the  _fuck_?” Ren snaps, eyes ablaze and glaring over Hux's shoulder. “Who the hell are you?”

Hux turns around with a start, finding a suited man standing in his ajar door. He glances down, catching a gun holster, then looks back up with a sneer, “Kindly fuck off.”

The man rolls his eyes, mouth pressing into a hard line. “Seriously? You’re two adults making out in a parking lot.”

“You'll understand the lack of propriety when  _your_  husband has been locked up for two years,” Hux says, ignoring the stunned inhale from the other seat – did Ren seriously expect him to go back on his word less than an hour later?

“Maybe,” the man says, his tone skeptical, gesturing with a hand back and forth like there's something to balance. “But I don’t think I’d be in this situation at all.”

“You’ve been following us since SKB,” Ren interrupts, his voice low and settling into something vicious. “Is that legal without probable cause, Agent Dameron?”

The apparent Agent Dameron’s narrow gaze skips past Hux in the next instant, focusing now on Ren with plain disbelief. He seems to be formulating some sort of comeback, eyes twitching with various responses deemed insufficient.

“Actually, Ben,” Skywalker interjects, her recognizable voice chiming in clear just before she actually appears from behind Dameron, bending down with an awkward smile. “Your Hux  _is_  a person of interest in a number of foreign cases. We could’ve followed you both wherever we wanted.”

“Fuck,” Ren says, leaning back into his seat and slumping down into the cushion. He looks toward the window with an audible grunt, hands curling into fists on his lap. “I didn’t know  _everyone_  was manipulating you these days, Hux.”

Hux glares sidelong for a few seconds, then slowly turns on the agents with an irritable flicker of his lashes. The pair of them stare back, seemingly judging him at a standstill with parallel frustration.

Dameron appears to grow bored in only moments, leaning forward on the still-open door with a grimace crossing his face. “What Agent Skywalker here  _meant_  to say that we could easily patronize this fine establishment long enough to ask our questions.”

Skywalker tips her head to the side with some agreement, though an irritated slant crosses her mouth as she glances toward her partner.

Hux rolls his eyes, looking backward himself in attempt to judge Ren’s particular willingness on the matter. He gets a half-hearted shrug, a petulant frown, and narrowed eyes catching his for barely a moment before the passenger door gets shoved open.

The inside of the diner is just as meager as the outside, cheap booths from before the Eighties mixed with newer aluminum foldouts in the center. A single one is occupied by a pair of retirees that peer at them in curiosity over cracked mugs of presumable coffee, half-eaten food still on their plates. It couldn't be more unfriendly if there were rats underfoot.

A faded white board at the door invites them to seat themselves, which Skywalker takes to lead them toward a window booth just in front of what must be Dameron’s four-door sedan featuring an aggressive grille guard. The rest of the view encompasses the entire corner lot, out into the street like it’s almost strategic, but Hux could’ve preferred something far closer to the exit.

“I didn’t really want to eat here,” Ren murmurs, leaning hard into Hux’s shoulder with what could only be described as a pout crossing his mouth.

“I’ve realized,” Hux says, looking forward again before he can do something foolish and mortifying, like reach up and pat Ren on the cheek. It could be easily passed off as sarcastic, but still far too fond for public consumption.

“She’s my cousin,” Ren continues, his voice in Hux’s ear as they slide into the booth, shoving past to move in first and near the window across from Skywalker. His eyes skid over the table and into a glare, “On my mother’s side, from a vaguely estranged twin brother. I know she didn’t tell you.”

Hux raises a surprised brow, glancing upward in the same direction to find Skywalker hurriedly tapping something into a phone. He thinks estranged might be too humble a word – a twin with a different surname? He feels like Ren should have told him this far sooner. “The other?”

“He… dyes his hair,” Ren says, the corner of his eye twitching with some cue of focus. His mouth folds into a grimace in the next moment, noticeably disappointed, “And feels old working with Rey.”

“How helpful,” Hux says flatly, taking up one of the menu at the head of the table – he comes away with something on his hand, and wipes the greasy residue onto Ren’s sleeve with a grimace.

“I don’t control what he thinks,” Ren growls, shifting away and reaching for his own menu, laminate threatening to crinkle under his hands. He clears his throat, speaking louder, “And don’t order the coffee, it’s been on the burner for like three hours.”

“Delightful,” Hux sighs, wondering if they have tea that isn’t made from shredded leaf litter.

A badly stifled bark of laughter interrupts the conversation, Dameron tapping his menu on the table and huffing with an audible note of skepticism in his voice, “You still think you’re psychic, dude?”

Hux looks up from his menu with a mild glare across the table, glancing from the scoffing Dameron to the awkwardly shrugging Skywalker, and finds himself suddenly curious if she’s similarly afflicted with Ren’s  _supposed_  genetic condition. If this entire situation built up to now has been strategic, the odds are rather high, but it also could’ve simply been some informed guesswork – it’s not exactly a secret that he’s scarcely moved on in the last two years.

“You volunteered to interrupt us, not to spare my cousin the embarrassment, but because you’re bitter,” Ren announces, two fingers tapping hard on the formica table, ring clinking against the edge. He glances up from the menu to look directly at Dameron, tilting his head with that familiar prying slant at his mouth – a sign he’s feeling particularly invasive. He puts the menu back without looking, the apparent goal now to be as unsettling as possible. “Afraid you’re going to die alone because you’re thirty-six and have only had two long-term relationships, so you try to look and act younger. You’re an FBI agent because NASA turned you down after you left the Air Force. You have a dog named BB, short for baba ghanoush – whatever that is – that you keep trying to bring to work.”

Dameron’s eyes grow wider and wider throughout the diatribe, his breath visibly weak in his chest. He swallows and glances to Skywalker with narrow suspicion, then seems to remember the very reason they’re there, glowering now with a hard line settling along his mouth.

Ren leans into the table with a sneer, expression his old patent mix of smug and bitter. “So no, I don’t  _think_  I’m psychic.”

“It may be linked to temper,” Hux says, sotto voce and pretending to contemplate a choice between greasy meat or undercooked eggs. “Your being  _muted_.”

Ren looks sideways though the corner of his eyes, catching Hux’s eyes through his lashes for a long moment, “Working hypothesis. Maybe.”

“Hey,” the server greets, tapping a pen against their thumb with a nervy smile, something about them curiously familiar as they clear their throat. “Are you guys ready to order? Or do you need a few minutes.”

“We’re ready,” Skywalker says, leaning forward and practically throwing her awkward smile at the server. “I’ll have waffles. And bacon and sausage. And orange juice.”

“Eggs and toast for me,” Dameron says, sending an overly bright smile up at the server, “Maybe some tomato juice? If it’s not too much trouble.”

“No problem, sir,” the server answers, scribbling down at their notes with an actual visible spot of color on their cheeks.

“Pan-fried steak, no gravy, and two sides of fried eggs,” Ren says, voice low with that put-upon disinterest, folding his menu in half and handing it over Hux’s front without looking from the window. “And whole milk.”

“If you chuck in that car, I’m divorcing you,” Hux mutters cuttingly, realizing too late that might be the wrong thing to say with the letters still stark in his mind. It used to be hollow threat, a way to mock Ren whenever he did anything particularly eccentric, but who knows how he might take it now.

Ren retorts with little more than a quiet grunt, but he catches Hux’s eyes with a surprising amount of humor; the reaction is comfortingly no different than he might’ve given years ago, if perhaps less dramatically vocal.

The server clears their throat, turning to Hux without quite looking. “And you, sir?”

Hux stares for a long moment, imagining the state of the kitchen with disgust. “Two slices of toast. And… tea.”

“Of course, sir,” the server says, expression still oddly avoidant and practically shoving their face into their order book, taking a blind step backward, then another, and nearly running into another table. “Your drinks will be right out.”

Dameron taps hard at the table just after they leave, then leans in with a vindictive glare, hands flat against the novelty placemats. “What was their life story, then,  _psychic_?”

“I don’t know,” Ren answers, reaching for his water with a shallow twitch of his shoulders. He takes a breath, looking through glass with a narrowed eye, “They’re just not as transparent as you.”

“Good Lord,” Hux mutters, rolling his eyes and glancing across the small diner, hoping the server will be coming any time. He feels a heavy foot kick against the side of his, and shakes his head without looking, “ _No_.”

“Come on,” Ren says, cajoling; a hesitant hand curls around Hux's thigh.

Hux shakes his head, though he chooses to allow the groping, daring to shift his legs wider. “Awful.”

The server mercifully reemerges from the kitchen with a tray of glasses and a plain white mug sporting a Lipton tag. They send a smile at Skywalker as she leans forward for orange juice, nod toward Dameron as well, then seem to somehow not look at all toward Ren or Hux’s side of the table even as they set down the tea and milk. They definitely recognize Hux as well, and not fondly, though avoidance here is far better than confrontation.

“Can we talk about why you’re here?” Skywalker says, “We’re on limited time.”

Hux tilts his head to the side as he lifts his mug, curling his hand into the warmth and pretending not to notice the slow stroke of a thumb down his knee. “Because you're taking advantage of a man recently released from a mental health institution?”

Dameron’s gaze goes just slightly narrow, his tone leisurely as he speaks, “You think you're real smart, don't you?”

“I simply know,” Hux says, taking a sip of the tea and somehow managing not to grimace at the taste.

“A few weeks ago there was an incident at a glue plant in Indiana,” Skywalker says, pulling out her phone and tapping at the screen with an odd sort of vigor. “It was of a certain untenable nature.”

Ren blinks slowly, a bemused expression flickering across his face. “You wanted me for science.”

“He isn’t the  _only_  biochemist in the country,” Hux says, raising an eyebrow and tempted to lean forward in some manner conspiratorial just to look more condescending. “You do realize this?”

“Yes, but,” Skywalker pauses, then turns her phone around to reveal a fuzzy snap of a furry, many-armed figure that seems to be some giant… insect?  “He is the only one of a certain sort.”

Hux blinks in disbelief, leaning forward and peering closer at the images. “Now how has that happened?”

“That's what we’re asking you,” Dameron says, taking a healthy drink from his glass, wearing an expression on his face like it’s some sort of hard liquor rather than tomato. “Or,  _him_. I guess.”

Hux feels a frown pinch at his mouth, looking back to the image and attempting to ignore an irrational prickle of insult. He worked side by side with Ren, for years, in a basement lab set aside for the both of them – he’s just as much an  _expert_. Not that he isn’t quite happy to have Ren next to him, but it really is a… manner of pride. He has equal skill.

“Looks more like a curse than chemistry,” Ren says, tilting his head to the side with a twist at his mouth. He reaches out and grabs the phone, then hums, turning it around with slow blink, “Is this a new iPhone?”

“Could you stay on task for five minutes?” Hux snaps, reaching out and taking the phone to set back on the table. He’s not sure if the frustration now is from affront or the reminder that Ren has been locked away from society for two years. “You look at that picture and decide you want the  _phone_?”

“It’s a nice phone,” Ren says, a small curl of a pout at his mouth.

“Christ,” Hux says, giving a half hearted shake of his head and heaving a sigh, “You’re useless.”

“ _You’re_  useless,” Ren retorts, his hand slipping away from Hux’s thigh and leaving it cold, now folding across the other on top of the table and shifting into a visibly tight grip around either bicep. “What happened to my old phone, huh? Or my MacBook – you couldn't even keep track of our stuff.”

Hux stares for a short, incredulous moment, feeling a familiar futility grow in his chest as he narrows his eyes into a glare. He’s finds himself determined not to raise his voice, instead hardening it into something that has it almost painful to speak when he opens his mouth. “I couldn't even go back myself, you ass, which you should remember from ten minutes ago.”

Ren practically snarls in response, hands letting loose of his own arms to instead curl into fists. “It doesn't even make sense!”

“Then just ask your bloody cousin, hm?” Hux says, gesturing to the other side of the table with a stiff hand, “She’s probably been reporting back to your delightful mother this entire time. Ask  _her_  why your equipment is sitting in some thrift store.”

Skywalker is staring with no little discomfort when Hux turns to her, and raises her brows after a long, silent moment. “I don't – I don't know. I was at the Academy.”

Hux scoffs under his breath, disbelieving, “So? Do you not talk to the woman?”

Skywalker’s expression coils into anger for a near-imperceptible instant, sending an irked glance to Dameron, who bears an unsubtle amount of pity in his expression. “I don’t think she would’ve emptied it herself, and Han would’ve said something. It’s probably just been sitting.”

“Sitting?” Ren repeats, with awful victory. “Fucking  _sitting,_ Hux.”

Hux takes a slow breath, attempting now to calm a familiar, cold fury and hearing something crack in his jaw with the tension of keeping it at bay. “For two years?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Skywalker says, wearing an uncertain grimace across her mouth. She exhales heavily, practically rolling her eyes, “I mean, I don’t know. You should have checked – aren’t you meant to be some kind of genius?”

Hux finds himself taken aback, swallowing hard on any number of over-defensive retorts; every single one would just make him more pathetic. “This means you’ve been paying both rent and a mortgage while using neither of them,” he mutters to Ren in the end, covering his face with both hands for a long moment, then exhaling hard between his fingers, “And  _taxes_.”

“You were supposed to be living in the apartment,” Ren says, his tone flat and condescending like this has become some sort of joke. “I’d think you wanted it to yourself.”

“I never –  _No_ ,” Hux says, trying to keep the aghast reaction off of his face. He could barely even sleep there after Ren got arrested, in the short weeks before his case was officially settled, when there’d been some modicum of a chance that he might come back. The apartment had been like a hollow echo of itself the entire time, over-quiet and empty.

It says nothing for how much  _worse_  it felt when he came home, less than a week after Ren was officially sentenced, to find his key no longer fit –  just as the Senator had threatened. He had found himself on a plane not a day out, scared despite himself and shame at his heels with razor-like teeth.

Ren narrows his eyes, staring hard for a long moment that might mean he's unsuccessfully trying at mental intrusion, until his expression abruptly shifts back into that unerring neutral. He exhales with an oddly unsatisfying defeat. “It’s not as if I _knew.”_

“I’m sure if one of you goes back, the super can get you a new key,” Skywalker interjects, seemingly dismissing the tension by her careless tone; granted, the disbelieving look she gets from Dameron suggests otherwise. She reaches forward and taps at her phone, trying to get attention back, “So could you just look at the picture?”

“It looks like someone tried to make a human into a spider,” Ren scoffs, breaking eye contact with Hux to instead focus on Skywalker, though he gratifyingly seems unhappy about it. “What do you want me to say?”

“How… that could happen, maybe?” Skywalker asks, raising an eyebrow, “It’s certainly not natural. I know you didn't just make drugs in that lab,  _Ben_.”

“Aside from the obvious fact it's some sort of rapid cellular mutation? I can't tell anything from a picture,” Ren says, leaning across the table with a mean twist at his lips. He shoves the phone practically off the table into Skywalker’s lap, “ _Reannon_.”

Hux clears his throat to catch Skywalker’s attention, nodding downward, “It’s adapted tech, obviously.”

Ren scoffs under his breath, slumping back into the booth just as he reaches out to gesture dismissively, nearly knocking a water glass over and placing his hand exceedingly close to Hux’s wrist. “You’re still into that cyberpunk dystopia crap?”

Hux moves the glass out of the way as he leans in sideways to sneer, wondering how obvious he’s being at getting very close to Ren’s face in a manner not entirely argumentative. “How else does a human get extra limbs, Ren? This is a clear case of prosthetic body hacking.”

“Or chemical-induced mutation,” Ren says, using that smug, patronizing tone that he favors when being a needlessly disagreeable twat – he’s definitely noticed the closeness by the lift of his chin. “Studies in mice – ”

“Mice?! This is a  _human being_ ,” Hux interrupts with an exaggerated scoff, impulsively glancing back to the picture with a grimace, still unsure, but shifting to brush just against Ren’s fingers with an upturn of his own hand, “Presumably.”

“It could be both,” the server interjects, materializing at the head of the table like a silent wraith, holding plates of meager food and a receipt tray. The apparent demand for payment now is a little untoward, but considering the patronage of this place, not entirely surprising. “And, uh, your brother said to tell you he was sorry he had to run. But he paid half, so win.”

Hux feels a frown stretch down his face as the server sets the tray down in front of him, quickly glancing to Dameron and Skywalker just to be certain it’s not actually directed at one of them, then looking back to the server as he tries to make any sense of the words. “My what?”

“Hey, he looks just like you,” Dameron says, reaching over Skywalker’s shoulder to point out the wide window with a curious frown. “Is his name just as stuffy as yours, like Agamedes or something?”

Hux frowns and looks to the window, finding a tall, far-too-familiar figure fussing with something near the rental, which seems to be running by the faint plume of exhaust at the back. The man straightens, revealing neatly parted ginger hair and a mildly perturbed expression on a clean shaven face, then wrenches the door open without pause, taking Hux’s bag out and throwing it onto the cracked chip and seal lot.

Hux stands with a start, shock and anger warring in his mind, then reaches out to Ren just because it feels like the thing to do, clutching hard at his wide shoulder.

“Ow?” Ren says, his voice bemused and muffled, stuffing a piece of greasy chicken into his mouth.

“Move,” Hux snaps, forcefully catching Ren’s eyes and hoping he doesn’t look too panicked. “ _Now_. Someone’s stealing the car.”

“What am  _I_  going to do?” Ren says, even as he’s clambering out of the bench after Hux, half tripping on his heels.

The car is already well in motion, and by the time Hux manages to push Ren out, barely visible as it innocuously drives off from the signal in the direction of Cambridge. He stares after it in disbelief, reaching up and curling a hand over his mouth to keep from turning around to snarl blame at Dameron and Skywalker, filing out behind Ren with similar disbelief on their faces. The server follows despite having little reason to, igniting again that niggling recognition, and Hux is beginning to think it’s not just some idle déjà vu.

“What the…” Dameron shoves to the front and kneels down next to his cruiser, ghosting a hand across a very perceptible split in rubber sidewalls. “Look at my fucking tires!”

“Why do I recognize you?” Hux demands, turning to the gawking server, feeling an anxious urgency up behind his ribs. He has too many people after him to be out in the open like this, though he doesn’t think most would have the time to establish a cover as a waiter at a place Hux only stopped at out of coincidence. “Are you with Farrow?”

“Who – ? No! I was just a student – well, still a – ” The server goes quiet for a few tense seconds, jaw shifting with visible unease, and their eyes fill with something that might even be a little resentment. “I was in your Neurotechnology in Action seminar. Two years ago. Finn – Major Finnemore.”

Hux blinks back as his suspicion eases way for honest surprise. “Ah.”

“Shit,” Ren murmurs, glancing sideways and catching Hux’s eyes with a grimacing sort of smirk.

“I kind of thought you guys were in jail or something,” Finn says, curling forward in a shrug and looking back forward to the space where Hux’s rental had been only minutes ago. “Or like, Cheyenne Mountain.”

“Can we… rewind back to that twin,” Dameron interrupts, his voice loud and far too close, leaning in with an accusing expression like somehow his car was a deliberate victim in this madness. “You don't have. That just stole your car. And destroyed mine.”

Hux takes a deep breath and shakes his head, glancing between blinks to the avoidant lip biting still happening at his side. He can suddenly feel the insidious disquiet of having seen a legitimate doppelganger officially trying to choke him – it’s far too much like all the nonsense Ren and he used to talk about while entirely outside their senses.

“No?” Dameron says, mouth falling open in affronted disbelief. “Seriously?”

“No,” Hux says, his voice less strong than he’d like as he looks out into the trafficked street. He could have a twin; one of the most notorious Senators in the US has a secret twin, and he didn’t know about that before ten minutes ago.

“ _W_ _e’re_ not the fucking cops,” Ren adds, taking a half step forward in front of Hux and gesturing with a hand that ends curled into a fist at his side. He exhales a harsh breath, “You deal with it.”

Dameron is quiet for a moment, then gives a low huff, turning around with a frustrated curl at the corner of his former unerringly laid-back expression. He lifts a hand, counting off with loose fingers in Skywalker’s direction, “We need to call the rental service, get the tracker, run him down… We could do that within like half an hour, right, Rey? Catch him red-handed.”

Skywalker spares a tense shrug, her head tilting back and forth as she looks from the open lot to Dameron with a dispirited frown. “Depends how soon we get another car from the Bureau out here.”

“Uh-uh,” Dameron says, his wide grin returning with an almost unsettling edge to it. He reaches out to gesture at Finn with a wave of his hand, “ _Posse comitatus_.”

“Finn, actually,” Finn corrects slowly, mouth pinching with some mix of confusion and affront.

“Shit, sorry,” Dameron says, taking a deep breath with something that might be a harried laugh and straightening his shoulders, his posture taking on some recognizable shift to professional as he reaches into a jacket pocket. He pulls out a badge and opens it with a flourish, revealing a bored image of himself. “My name is Special Agent Poe Dameron, this is my partner Special Agent Rey Skywalker, and we would like to use your vehicle, should you have one, in pursuit of a criminal. If you do not, we would greatly appreciate an opportunity to speak to your manager.”

Finn appears understandably stunned, brows going up and indiscreetly glancing to Hux and Ren with a patent expression of dismay, frown flickering across his mouth as he hurried looks back to Dameron. “All of you?”

It would almost be insulting if Hux wasn’t still mentally embroiled in that thirty seconds or so of watching a slightly more tidy version of himself commit felony theft. On himself. He can’t actually remember if he even bought insurance with the hire company. He looks down to the bag still spilled out on the ground, swallowing tightly and trying not to think about the letters rolled up tightly next to folded trousers – money wouldn’t have been able to replace  _them_.

“Absolutely not,” Dameron says, signaling with a twisting pair of fingers backward and shaking his head with a certain amount of stressed impatience, eyes darting quickly down the street at the sound of a car horn. “These assholes aren’t with us. We’re about to put an APB out on one of them,  _again_ , so he better go hide.”

Skywalker clears her throat, running a hand up and over her tied-back hair. “Technically.”

Finn raises his brows, looking now to Skywalker, who gives a firm smile, then backward at the diner with a predictable look of dread. He takes a deep breath, reaching into a pocket and pulling out a trio of keys filled out by a keyfob bearing what looks to be an embarrassing reference to OpenPGP. “I’m so getting fired.”

“FBI’ll pay for your gas and like a single salary period, bud,” Dameron says, reaching forward and grabbing the keys with a clasp on Finn by the shoulder, then practically running to the pair of SUVs and jumping for the black Yukon after pressing on the fob prompts it to light up. He lifts a hand in victory when the door opens with a piercing creak, yelling out, “Your country thanks you.”

“Damn it,” Finn mutters, hastily pulling the apron off his shoulders. He balls it up with an odd sense of poise and throws it backward, with such vigor that it hits the door with a dull clang of the old bell, then summarily takes off after the agents with a yell about theft. 

Hux gives a low hum of incredulity as he watches the SUV peel out of the lot with a worrying tilt of the body off the curb, almost like the whole thing might just fall on its side; it would be just the next baffling disaster to happen today, which is starting to feel quite a lot like an overlong lucid dream. He should probably call someone for confirmation of his siblinghood, but the only parent he'd feel comfortable asking, and has actually spoken to in the last decade, wasn't even part of the process; instead, he simply walks over to his forgotten rucksack, taking a deep breath as he grabs the bag by the handle and picks it up with a short exhale of effort. He'd left the other bag in Maine, the one with a few key pieces of untoward research and development, but this one would have been a bigger loss, at least in terms of sentiment and cigarettes.

He glances backward to find Ren looking at something on the ground, the corners of a frown just visible, and feels a quiet pang deep behind his ribs. He opens his mouth, calling out, "What do you feel about doing a runner?"

Ren lifts his head with a visible start, shrugging tightly and crossing his arms around his chest. "Is that limey for dine and dash?"

"You know it is," Hux sighs, forcefully reducing any imprudent amusement into a grimace, "And no one but you had even eaten anything."

Ren falls silent again for a few moments, then turns on a heel, both hands abruptly dropping to his sides and curling into loose fists. "Yeah, we - She's really angry."

Hux looks through the window to find someone in white standing just inside, near their table, visibly at some kind of loss until their eyes connect with his and harden into steel in an instant. He shifts his bag on his shoulder and looks back to Ren with a short nod, taking a step back and gratified to see Ren moving forward at a similarly quick pace, hurried enough that the both of them only take a few minutes to make it to a bus stop a few streets down and far out of sight from the diner. The bus can already be seen approaching from far off, perhaps even the faint pitchy chime of the door warning heard, but that might be some combination of memory and imagination. 

"You don't have a twin," Ren says, his low voice breaking the silence of their little piece of sidewalk. 

Hux curls his lips over his teeth and stares a few seconds longer at the pitted concrete under their feet, unwillingly recalling the slimy, unnatural feeling he'd gotten just watching that man for a few seconds from meters away; it had been so deeply uncomfortable, recognizing his own expressions, his own posture, in this off-putting example of  _other._  He looks up to catch Ren's solemn eyes, exhaling a slow, breathy huff that will likely be recognized as nothing other than begrudging agreement. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Neurotechnology in Action was apparently a real course in MIT, and a _graduate_ one, which it remains in this story. The story will probably include OT3 elements in the background, but I didn't tag it because that would be a Dick Move™.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I guess you didn’t plan on being here long,” Ren says, jingling the keys against his thigh.
> 
> Hux looks up, narrowing his eyes as they stop in front of the door. Their door. It looks exactly the same, not even a new coat of paint to cover up a black scuff on the jamb.
> 
> “One bag,” Ren says, pointing with a key, “Half your waistcoat collection wouldn’t even fit in that.”
> 
> “I travel light,” Hux says, looking back down and watching with some unease as Ren slides the key into the lock. He wonders how long he’ll be able to hide that his combined clothing at this point could fit in a single drawer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies to anyone following the story for taking so long with this update. I have had a _variety_ of life distractions crowding my mind in the last month, but hopefully the remaining updates will be on proper schedule.
> 
> ALSO: If you wish to skip it, sex scene starts about _A short tilt of his leg..._ and ends at about _..."Better than those fancy fucks in Europe?"_
> 
>  
> 
> ~~(And for additional clarification: Hux is going to think many malicious things about certain characters, but it doesn't mean it's true. It only means he doesn't get along with them.)~~

It takes just under an hour of irritatingly late bus transfers to even hit the old street, let alone at the right spot, but it gives Hux time and a half to go through a series of minor panics. His plan for the day, for eternity even, has been spoiled by a mirage and the federal gov’t; he’s about to approach a place he thought he’d never see again, and, if he’s being cynical, thinks he still won’t; and Ren is feeling enough like himself, or the him that Hux thinks he remembers him to be, that he’s just had to be held back by the shirt to keep from escalating rude conversation into a fight with a fellow passenger.

Ren is still muttering under his breath as the offender steps off, turning into the grab bar and mouth just near Hux’s ear. “You don’t fucking control me.”

“Except that I do,” Hux murmurs back low, glancing over to glare through the corner of his eye. “Or don’t you remember?”

Ren actually snarls through his teeth, leaning in closer as some attempt to loom like a gargoyle over Hux’s shoulder. “I only signed that so – ”

“So you wouldn’t have to speak with anyone, wasn’t it?” Hux interrupts, feeling an answering sneer form across his lips as he turns to look Ren more fully in the face. He flattens his free hand down along his thigh, keeping himself from reaching out to poke a finger at that wide chest. “Act like an _adult,_ Ren.”

“Fuck off.”

Hux shakes his head with excess irritation, only to lose his balance as the bus hits a pothole, consequently shoving into Ren’s chest with some sort of irony. He sighs and pushes off half-heartedly, trying to blink widely only to find his eyelids like weights, exhaustion creeping in at the worst opportunity. He could probably fall asleep right here, standing up.

He manages, after another few moments, to peek through his lashes to find Ren judging, and frowns back so hard he thinks his mouth might stay frozen this final time. He knows how he must appear, and to have that look coming from a man who is very much the barney with trashy fashion sense he was just accused of being is completely unnecessary on the whole.

Ren glances forward after another moment of staring, head tipping down as a conceited smirk twists into his mouth. He shrugs forward, jostling Hux into the bar even as he’s still looking away. “You fucking wanted me _bad_.”

Hux rolls his eyes forward, unable to keep them from falling closed again; hopefully, Ren will realize their stop is just two ahead.

“You look like you haven’t slept in a week,” Ren continues, helpful as ever at pointing out the obvious, though the fact he’s warm and solid is quickly eking out the usual irritation. “Not that you really do anyway, like a vampire, but you probably should soon.”

“Vampires sleep,” Hux says, some small part of his mind incredulous at his taking this conversation further, “In coffins.”

“Have you talked to one recently?” Ren asks, speaking slowly and his attitude needlessly condescending; his arm brushes across Hux’s back as he leans over to pull the cord for their stop. 

“Sometimes it feels like it,” Hux mutters, stretching his neck and shoulders in preparation of being forced to walk, opening his eyes in time to catch the driver making a pinched face in the mirror as the bus lurches with the brakes. “You pulled late. Again.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Ren says, scoffing aloud and voice settling into a particularly familiar tone: one of outright _insincerity_. “They were stopping anyway.”

Hux turns around to look Ren square in the face, just to be sure he sees the disbelieving expression. “I’m not blind, Ren.”

“Had your eyes closed, though,” Ren mutters as they step off onto the street, shoulders hunched forward and shoving his hands deep into pockets.

It isn’t until they’re in the lobby that Hux notices Ren has kept oddly close to his back, heels being trodden on by boots when he comes to a stop in front of the partitioned-off lobby reception. He doesn’t even take a step away as they idle, only shifts on his feet with commiserating irritation when the super declines to answer their shrill bell for an entire three minutes.

“Oh, hello! I didn’t know you’d be back so soon,” the presumed super says, bumbling out of their apartment with an unseasonably warm coat wrapped around their shoulders. They only pause a moment on Hux, brows furrowing tight, then look back to Ren with a tenser smile as they lean into plexiglas. “Are you having a problem, Ren?”

“Uh,” Ren intones, his voice sounding oddly faint at being addressed; sensibly so, as this is not the person he once got in a screaming fight with about a broken tap. “No. No, I just need a key. Our keys. All of them.”

The super looks to Hux again between blinks, eyes narrowing now with bemusement. “Alright.”

“We lost them, I guess,” Ren continues, now almost babbling with the sort of nerves that have Hux turning to look at him in disbelief. “Or I did. Absent professor moment.”

“Oh, you’re a professor?” The super asks, turning around on their heels with a curious hum, heading toward the small office on the other of the hall. “I thought you were away at some sort of chemical engineer conference. Like a scientist.”

“Well, I – I am,” Ren calls after, voice getting tight to the point of breaking, “I’m both. That’s what – I’ve _definitely_ been doing science.”

“Do stop talking,” Hux murmurs, resetting his bag on his shoulder, listening to the soft scuffle of feet and sharp jingle of various brass keys. He glances down to the floor with a frown, trying to run through the conversation again and wondering if he’d heard wrong, but no – they had greeted Ren like they’d met him. 

“Here you go, hun, I’ll add the fee to your rent if you decide to keep them,” the super says, sliding the keyring through the little safety door. Their eyes practically skip past Hux as they turn back to the short hall into their apartment, uninterested now he’s proven harmless. “Have a nice day.”

Hux is quiet for a few moments, then turns around to watch Ren shuffle over to the bank of mailboxes. “Did you know them from the asylum, then?”

“Hah,” Ren answers flatly, mouth twisted into a puzzled grimace. He looks up a moment later, expression falling more neutral. “I mean, maybe?”

Hux leans against the front counter and watches Ren trying keys on the post box labeled 15, frowning when one of them actually slides in and turns to release. He shoves off the counter and walks over, “Are they even allowed to duplicate the post keys?”

“Who cares,” Ren says, pulling the door open with a yank. His face falls in near the same moment, and he takes out what seems to be the only mail: a single envelope. “Do you have someone getting the mail?”

“Hadn’t even occurred to me,” Hux admits, staring past Ren and into the empty post box. He reaches out to grab the envelope from Ren's loose fingers – it’s a renewal notice for _The Biochemist_.

Ren silently closes the little door, then exhales a slow, weighty breath. “It must be the super.”

Hux agrees with a stilted shrug, glancing backward toward the stairs into the hall, then turning around completely to walk forward and push open the door. The fire escape is open on the other end, innocuously propped open and facing a familiar back alley. Hux thinks he can actually feel his limbs turning to stone at the sight, slowing his step until he stops; his last memory of this place is in that narrow space, smoking borrowed cigarettes and making desperate phone calls, ignoring shaking hands and stinging eyes.  

Hux really hates that he stopped at that diner.

“You waiting on me?” Ren says, walking past and breaking the miserable silence to pieces. He climbs up the stairs two at a time, in some hurry, though he stops when he reaches the small landing at their floor, peering down at Hux through the handrail. “Seriously, what are you doing?”

“Tired,” Hux mutters, only half-lying as he reaches out to pull himself up into the stairwell.

The remaining walk is short, but quiet, and it could almost be any other day two years ago if he pretended hard enough; the bag on his shoulder could be filled with scrap, the twinge in his side could be from sleeping wrong, the sharpness of Ren’s cheek could be the harsh light.

“I guess you didn’t plan on being here long,” Ren says, jingling the keys against his thigh.

Hux looks up, narrowing his eyes as they stop in front of the door. Their door. It looks exactly the same, not even a new coat of paint to cover up a black scuff on the jamb.

“One bag,” Ren says, pointing with a key, “Half your waistcoat collection wouldn’t even fit in that.”

“I travel light,” Hux says, looking back down and watching with some unease as Ren slides the key into the lock. He wonders how long he’ll be able to hide that his combined clothing at this point could fit in a single drawer.

Ren shoves in with typical impatience as he opens the door, dropping the keys to the counter and walking forward, settling against the back of the couch with both hands for a silent minute. He turns around after another few seconds, a hard set at his mouth, though Hux could barely notice with a few details obvious the moment the door swung open. “I thought you said you didn't have a chance to get your stuff.”

“I didn’t,” Hux says, feeling something like anguish as he glances around the main room. His record player, the blankets he knows he'd left on the couch, the stupid Union Jack that Ren got him – they’re all gone. It’s as if someone had walked in and erased _him_ from the apartment, like the two years he’d spent here with Ren never existed.

“Hux?” Ren says, but his voice sounds like it’s in a vacuum, stretching and fading.

On a whim, Hux turns around and – and, oh, at least the fucking _kettle_ is still here. It’s likely because it wasn’t actually his, as Ren probably used it more for his dreadful instant ramen and various deadly experiments.

He takes a few deep breaths, trying to repress the awful throbbing ache pressing now just behind his eyes. It would be one thing to find the place empty of everything, but this is just… He’d known the Senator hated him, believed him little more than some conniving plague upon her son, but this is just unimaginably spiteful.

He is a floor down and outside in that stupid alley before he realizes what he’s done, the soft grind of gears loud in his ears and bringing him back to the dim light of the street. He looks down through the arms curled around his head to watch the ring spin, counting exponentially in threes. He wonders where his exhaustion has gone.

A clatter of heavy boots is heard soon enough, stomping down the stairs in haste and audibly running into the loose metal jamb. The propped door can be heard shaking for a few tense seconds, as if it might interfere before any words can cut the silence.

“The Senator called me heartless the last time she saw me,” Hux mutters, still multiplying every revolution and trying to distract from the awful feeling curling around his lungs. The curtain on that locked door has finally been pulled after two years, and… he should’ve been over it before now. “Probably at the same time her people were doing _that_ , the hypocrite.”

“Hux, that…” Ren trails off, still hovering in the open entry. “Why do you think it was my _mom_?”

“So when you came home, it'd look like I just up and left you,” Hux grits out, looking up with a glare, irritated at having to explain the obvious for trillionth time. “Because, as said, I am a cold-blooded bastard.”

Ren is silent for a few seconds, then steps forward, walking right past Hux and slumping down onto the step just below him, practically in the dirt. “If you say so.”

“And _…_ and you should know I’m not in robotics anymore,” Hux confesses, looking back down at the darkened space between his elbows and thighs. He takes a deep breath, biting hard at the inside of his lip for a long moment, then exhaling quickly, “I design _weapons_ – guns, bombs, drones. I sell them to whoever wants them, however they want them. I don’t really do anything with the money, except pay for hotels – I’ve been living at this really nice one in Spain.”

Ren is troublingly silent in the following moments, though the sound of his too-many considering breaths nearly overtake the gears of the ring. “Oh.”

Hux swallows tightly, willing himself to stop spinning the ring and shifting to flex both hands around his knees. His brain is skipping between tracks and he can’t be sure the cause between recent sleepless days and taxing years. “It’s how they got me, actually, at the hotel. There was – _is_ this pool attendant. I never spoke with him, never swam, but from far enough away I could… I could see him at the right angle, and he looked quite a lot like you. Sometimes I’d catch him at the corner of my eye and believe it was, just for moment.”

Ren gives an odd little hum at the pause, though he doesn’t seem particularly judging, or envious. A hand conspicuously circles around Hux’s ankle, squeezing slightly before just as quickly disappearing.

“It was selfish, though,” Hux says, after he’s sure enough in his voice to continue. He can recall almost every stolen glance where he found himself fooled by wavy dark hair and wide shoulders, and by far more then just a pool cleaner – tourists, buskers, drunkards, businessmen, even once a bus driver – but more devastating was always the resulting strike of remembrance that widened an already unstable fissure. “Because you were put in a mental institution after I made you a fucking accessory to some… _megalomaniac_ who used students for test trials.”

The alley goes quiet again, suffocating in its lack of sound, and Hux opens his mouth again only to immediately close it. He hasn’t asked, he probably never will manage it, but he’s wondered for the last two years what it was he let Snoke do right under his nose. With his _husband_. To his _own_ grad student. He let everything he was responsible for go wrong because he judged a madman by his tenure.

“You feel guilty,” Ren says, after a good four minutes of silence.

Hux looks up, an urge to kick Ren right off the stoop overtaking his shame. “Obviously!”

“No, I mean,” Ren reaches out and hovers with a hand over Hux’s knee for a long moment, then drops it just next to Hux’s own tight grip. His fingers are warm and strong, wrapping around a good portion of Hux’s thigh. “It wasn’t… It was _my_ fault.”

Hux shakes his head, a bank of self-effacing sins at the ready. “If I hadn’t introduced either of you, it wouldn’t have happened.”

“I _knew_ what I was doing, Hux,” Ren says, his voice suddenly forceful, rising with anger. He catches Hux in a hard stare, jaw visibly tightening and mouth twisting into a trembling frown, “I mean, I think – but Mitaka was definitely there because of me. He wouldn’t have even _applied_ for the position if it weren’t for me.”

Hux furrows his brows at the abrupt pause, the way Ren seems to swallow his own words before continuing, expression losing a good deal of anger to melancholy. Hux almost reaches out but something stops him, keeping his hands to himself.

“I knew how scared he was during, how painful it was for him, but I stood there and I let it happen, practically taking notes,” Ren continues, breaking the stare and falling sideways, digging his forehead into Hux’s knee. He breathes for a few moments, grip tightening on Hux’s leg, though voice diminishing and feeble. “I listened to him in there, his mind curdling with terror. I realized too late that what I had against him didn’t matter in comparison.”

Hux listens with new trepidation, growing hesitant of his own assumptions. “You had something _against_ Mitaka?”

“I still don’t know what I heard, afterward, but it’s practically all I can remember about the entire thing,” Ren says, ignoring Hux’s words and pressing forward again, fingers digging into flesh as he shakes his head. “For weeks, always reminding me of what I’d done. I couldn’t take it, his judgment echoing against my mind. I don’t know what it was, Hux, I – I can’t… I can’t describe it.”

Hux is silent for a few seconds, unsure what to say; eventually, he simply let’s go of one of his knees, reaching over and sinking into Ren’s unkempt hair. It’s less soft than it once was, more brittle, but Ren still reacts as predicted, curling over Hux’s leg like it’s a misshapen teddy.

It makes Hux want to go back to that awful prison of a hospital and tell them exactly how useless they all are – two years and little has changed. Ren is still capricious and self-flagellating, seeking comfort in scarecrows and making excuses for the monsters in his life, even if one of them seems to be himself.

“You need a phone,” Hux says, when time has darkened sun into a thick overcast, his fingers absently freeing Ren’s hair from knots. “A credit card. New clothes.”

“It’s like I was frozen,” Ren mutters, words muffled some by Hux’s leg. “Time passed so slowly in there.”

“You could have checked yourself out,” Hux says, grudgingly pulling back his hand, but leaving his knuckles resting across a wide shoulder.

“I couldn’t.” Ren shakes his head, voice lowering with a curious note of reluctance, almost shame. “Everything was… It was like a bubble. I knew the outside world was still here, but I didn’t want to be part of it. I didn’t have to think; I didn’t have to listen to other people think.”

“You made sure no one could see you,” Hux adds, taking a slow breath and realizing that if he had the inclination to divorce, he would've been forced to come in himself, see the state of Ren before he officially abandoned him. If he could have gone through with it… then the whole precarious balance of isolation would fall.

It was a nasty sort of pressure to put on him, but predictable from Ren.

“I was so sure the lawyer wouldn’t let me do that,” Ren says, looking up from Hux’s leg with raised brows, eyes still red but clearing quickly, “But I paid him double.”

“The benefits of wealth,” Hux says, rolling his eyes across the alley and finding an unnerving cat watching them from the window of the next door house.

A trio of business-types drift down the sidewalk from the Red Line, sparing a few curious glances before turning back down to their conversation with general disinterest. A teenager nearly trips over Ren’s feet with a hasty apology and a clumsy dip of their glittery phone, then a skittery laugh when they have to climb over both of them to get through the door; they must have snuck out, coming back this way.

“Have you really been living out of hotels?” Ren asks, his tone the very description of skepticism.

“It’s not as awful as people make it out to be,” Hux says, trying to think of something he really disliked about the _hotels_ , which were nothing but consequential compared to his general aimlessness and determination to overwork himself into a stupor. He’d actually done a lot of inventing in his resolve to keep from retrospection. “Room service; daily cleaning. Minibar.”

“Did you stay at the house, then?” Ren asks next, sounding almost wary of his own words. “At all.”

Hux hums low, pressing his lips together and suddenly aware of the distinct poke of a keyring into his thigh. He hasn’t quite let himself _really_ think about the disappointment of not being able to get back; he had believed they’d be on a ferry right now.

“You liked to talk about it,” Ren says, looking up with wide eyes, a glint in them that would be innocent if he were anyone else. “Maine.”

Hux scratches uneasily at the back of his neck, trying to keep from resuming the worrying on his ring. “I assume my shop was going in the boathouse.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Ren says, giving a stilted shrug that knocks his shoulder against Hux’s knee.

“Probably wouldn’t be kept out there completely,” Hux says, suddenly wondering what the Senator did with all the work and research that had been lying around the apartment. He knows for certain there were still a couple bots out, and not entirely defenseless. “But it’s a nice thought.”

Ren’s face falls with a marked degree of distress, mouth crumpling into a frown. “Yeah.”

Hux blinks back in bemusement, responding in turn with grimace at his own lips; he doesn’t remember Ren hating the disorderly span of work _that_ much. He was no better anyway, putting together awful things in the kitchen rather than using it for edible food.

“Boys!” An aged voice greets, accompanied by soft footsteps and the click of a cane.

“Ms. Kanata,” Hux says, shuffling up reluctantly from the stoop to his feet; Ren, one step lower, looks now even smaller.

Maz Kanata, though standing, is just as short with her diminutive stature, wrinkled and aged as she sends a small smile to Hux. “Dr Hux, I wasn’t sure you would ever be back.”

“I’m just – we’re picking up some things,” Hux says, unsure if she’d seen, or even could remember, the mess of police and university officials from two years ago. He has a vague idea of her presence, but his years of repressing that time have been… largely successful. “We have a house in Maine.”

“Oh, how lovely,” Maz says, cradling one hand over her cane as the other shifts her impressive spectacles, looking wistful at the mere idea. “I shot a moose up there once.”

Ren turns on the stoop to stare, his melancholy turned to disbelief; Hux feels much the same, wondering if a little rifle was made up for her, or if she still has it. He’s not quite sure he trusts her with a gun – her eyesight is notoriously awful.

“I’m glad you got him back,” Maz whispers, downright conspiratorial, one tiny hand reaching out to pat at Ren’s shoulder. She passes by in the next moment, disappearing behind the door like it’s just another day.

“She’s still alive?” Ren hisses, tugging hard at Hux’s trousers like a curious child.

Hux looks down with a shrug. “Apparently.”

Ren stares back for another few seconds, then slowly stands with a wide stretch of his shoulders. He settles into a glower with an almost unnerving steadiness in the next moment, a familiar icy chill manifesting from nowhere, until he abruptly leans forward, lingering close and pouting in Hux’s face. “I want to go back inside.”

“Then do so, you brat,” Hux says, reaching up and pushing Ren away by the shoulder, turning himself to face the hall. He still feels an unspeakable loathing at the idea of going back up, but his settling mind is turning back to exhaustion, urging him to find anywhere to go unconscious for a few hours before he outright shuts down. “And don’t read my mind.”

“I wasn’t,” Ren whines, shifting forward and pressing too close for stair climbing, then even closer when they reach the top step, his too-big hands hovering at Hux’s back. “I was skimming. Because you’re freaking out a little.”

Hux ignores the thin invitation for more bloody _talking_ , instead looking down and sighing as he reaches their door to find it unlocked. It’s probably for the best, all considered, with how likely it has ever been that Ren remembered keys.

He tries not to look around again as he walks into the apartment, idly rubbing at his brow and turning down the hall. He longs to pass out, but the sudden dread of finding his room empty forces him to turn left rather than right, shutting the toilet door in the face of a madman who tries to follow him in; he is going to _shower_ , then he is going to sleep, but when he wakes he is going to get another rental car, he is packing Ren up, and he is leaving this empty grave of self for good.

* * *

 

It is another of those dreams, subconscious indulgence paired with cruelty, of a broad figure curled into his chest and quietly breathing. He doesn’t have it often, especially with how his mind these days is usually tangled in nightmares of his less intelligent dealings. The situation is admittedly unusual compared to prior instances, usually after this many seconds it is far more sexual, but here he’s still laying on his side, consciousness made up more of cotton than lust. He’s never been so soft and warm with anyone, let alone this loud-mouthed brat.

“Asshole,” Ren mutters, shifting onto his back and revealing a familiar phone between his hands, looking up to Hux with a frown.

The memories come back in a sudden, almost painful lurch, and Hux finds himself turning onto his front and groaning into his pillow. Even worse than the idea of the lucid cuddle dream, he now has an absolutely disgusting urge to reach out and curl his fingers into Ren’s hair, to draw him closer until they’re fused and inseparable.

“You’ve been out for like ten hours.”

Hux feels a grimace twisting up across his face. He hasn’t slept that much since… well, he’s sure he has before – teenagers sleep a lot, don’t they? And he definitely remembers those miserable years.

Ren shifts on the bed, the side of his hand palpable for a spare moment against Hux’s elbow before disappearing, though still close enough to be felt as warm. He’s clearly taken Hux’s half-mad permission to sleep in the same bed with premature exuberance. “Okay, it was more like six, but I nearly put together smelling salts.”

“You’re just looking for an excuse,” Hux murmurs, turning to peek over his arm, glaring, “To turn the kitchen back into a bloody laboratory.”

“It’s too clean,” Ren says, rolling his eyes with inflated offense, then exhaling a sigh that is accompanied by a short, sulking twist of a frown, “But my equipment is gone.”

Hux feels like he’s stuck in some juvenile film, staring into Ren’s soft brown eyes and feeling such a legitimate pity against his own opinion; he hates when the cookery is transformed against its will into veritable alchemy lab. “Oh?”

“Yeah,” Ren says, his voice fading to a bitter mutter.

The following silence settles heavy, and lasts for so many moments that it practically invites Hux to fall back asleep, though he doesn’t realize this until his eyes are actually closed and Ren uneasily clears his throat. He tries to convince himself to move, ticks of points that he needs to get up and start executing for his plan, but he… He feels so oddly cocooned, and not at all uncomfortably.

“I did work out though, or _tried_ – I’m like twenty pounds down,” Ren says, sounding unduly pained. He goes quiet for another moment, then exhales a breath that turns upward into something like a laugh. “Can you imagine how jacked I’d be if I went to jail, though?”

Hux feels a disbelieving scoff escape his throat before he can think better of it.

“Fuck you,” Ren says, and there is a shuffle of the duvet that somehow _sounds_ defensive, not to mention the patent sensation of being leaned over but someone larger. It flares something small at the back of Hux’s mind, even though he’s no longer ten and Ren is only a _bit_ of a bully. “I would be great in jail.”

“Interesting way to put it,” Hux says, peering through his lashes to catch Ren in a stare. He lazily reaches up and taps hard at that wide chest, watching Ren wince with little more than exaggeration. “Stop talking like that.”

“But in jail there wouldn’t be other patients to complain,” Ren says, slumping down and shifting over onto his back, gesturing at textured ceiling with a forceful swing of his hand. His voice has lost most of the previous humor, settling into a familiar, low note of restrained bitterness. “Or just _one_ , I guess, who decides I’m getting ready for some apocalypse and tells everyone else about it.”

“Apocalypse,” Hux repeats, glancing through the corner of his eye to find Ren now outright scowling, “Were you bringing it about through exercise, then?”

“I don’t fucking know – it was like a year ago,” Ren groans, curling up with both hands to cover his own face. He breathes loud into his palms for a few seconds, then drags his fingers straight down to his neck, looking over to Hux with a grimace twisting up his mouth. “I just… I was feeling better. So I started going to their tiny gym on rec time, but then the doctor told me I had to stop because it was _scaring_ people. Like the reason I was in there had something to do with my fists.”

Hux looks away to keep his frown on the ceiling, taking a long inhale as he reaches out absently to pat Ren on the hip. It continues to be rather infuriating that Ren came out of that hospital with somehow more neuroses crowding his vast mind.

He grudgingly extracts himself from the bed, ignoring Ren’s startled hum, and stumbles into the toilet across the hall. He looks up with a sigh as he closes the door, only to stare at the mirror aghast; he looks even worse than yesterday – his face is gaunt, his skin pallid and bruised under his eyes. The sleep has done nothing but make him more of a ghoul than ever.

“Perfect,” he mutters, swallowing tightly and reaching for his bag, still on the floor near the bath.

He doesn’t have many clean clothes left at this point, and pulls out his singular pair of jeans, fading and torn at the knees; he can already hear the snide comments on his loss of fashion sense. Of course he’d get his apartment back, only for ninety percent of his belongings to be gone. He had been forced to sleep in _Ren’s_ room, which while much cleaner than he was used to, should’ve been the one turned into a gym for how much it was Ren’s life dream.

The person in the mirror is even harder to look at now, between his face and his unassuming tourist disguise, and the flickering memory of that put-together stranger at the diner fills him with more bitterness now than incongruity. He’d tried to look as much as himself when he’d went to see Ren, aiming to be some impossible degree of normal, but it’s more obvious now than ever that he’s someone else entirely to two years ago.

He’s not a renowned technologist; he’s a fucking arms dealer.

The bag gets stuffed back full with his meager toiletries, and he pauses a few moments before leaning in the bath and taking a few of the questionable homemade soaps and shampoos. If they spill and turn everything to acid, he’s going to be furious, but if all goes right, it might come off as a rather thoughtful gesture to look back on when some unhappy customer shows up to kill him.

He slings the bag over his shoulder, opening the door, only to startle as a pair of arms abruptly slam either side of him and lock him in near the wall. He panics for a short moment, reaching out, only to feel a fool as his hand hovers just over the ear of an idiot who would probably be more intimidating, or at all intimidating, if he wasn’t currently looking down near Hux’s collarbone.

“What are you doing?” Hux asks, letting his hand drop onto a shoulder, mentally bounding back and forth between reaching out with the other to grasp Ren about the waist, or shove him away with irritation; he’s leaning far on the first, as the second might send the wrong message.

“I…” Ren takes a deep breath, looking up and catching Hux’s eyes with a dark, oddly familiar intensity. “I want to suck you off.”

“Oh,” Hux intones, feeling his brows go up in genuine surprise.

Ren moves in further now with an anxious raise of his eyebrows, a hesitant turn at the corner of his mouth. He inhales another breath, glancing down and away for a sporadic moment, then peeks up with a stilted smile. “ _Or_ something else. Anything that might encourage you to touch my dick.”

“You mean to tell me you didn’t come doing sit ups or whatever?” Hux asks, lifting his chin and forcing his mouth into a sardonic frown.

“That was one time,” Ren says, so close now that his eyes are practically Hux’s entire field of vision, his tone and expression at odds with his words: light and almost playful. “And I regret telling you about it.”

“I regret hearing about it,” Hux agrees, slowly giving into his secondary urge to drop his bag, sliding his other hand down and around Ren’s waist, then across his hips. The jumper is different from earlier; it sports a slight waffle pattern, textured under his fingers.

A short tilt of his thigh upward makes clear that Ren is already well hard through his sweats, which answers the main question: he must have been wanking and heard Hux open the door. It almost makes him laugh aloud even as he shifts his hand just around Ren’s neck, gently dragging a thumbnail down the line of a tendon. “You’ve already started.”

“Maybe,” Ren gasps, tilting his head up, a rather conspicuous gulp the only fight against the pressure.

Hux feels a smirk grow across his lips with little real thought, a forgotten thrill of control pulsing through his blood. He moves his other hand around Ren’s hip and down to the front of his sweats, fly bulging under his fingers, and ignores an overeager itch to drag Ren’s cock out right away as he starts slowly tracing an outline inward with his fingers. “I’m surprised you didn’t try this the moment we walked out of there,” he says, slowly flaring his hand and palming more fully, until the lewd shape is distinct and obvious through the the thick fabric. “You’ve been patient.”

Ren nods with a graceless haste, his chin running up against Hux’s hand; his eyes are dark, dilated and half closed, and staring so intently they might start boring holes.

Hux keeps the challenge up for at least a minute or more, then shifts his hand again, tightening the pressure and watching as Ren squeezes his eyes shut. He rolls a smirk between his teeth, debating on having Ren come in these obscene sweatpants, but his own hardening cock is a reminder that he doesn’t presently have the trousers to risk the odds of a similar, retributive treatment.

He grudgingly relaxes his hand on Ren’s throat, looking down as he hastily shoves at the sweatpants, doing his best to shove the waistband down with one hand. He watches his palm curl around the exposed, flushed cockhead, smearing that little drool of precome and sliding his fingers all the way down the shaft, offering a few slow pulls halfway before gently squeezing at the tight sack.

Ren groans low and loud, bucking up as he presses in close, breath warm just above Hux’s collarbone.

“Oh?” Hux intones, swallowing tightly as he realizes how nervous he is, heat flaring behind his ears with more than excitement. It’s only a hand job, just another of an innumerable amount, but he can’t help to feel like he’s being judged for it, as if there is some minuscule likelihood of Ren taking off if Hux forgets just the right pressure.

Ren murmurs something unintelligible, moving in even closer, his hard cock insistent in Hux’s hand with unsubtle thrusts. He has one arm curling over Hux’s shoulder now, the other right at Hux’s hip, and it tips off memory of the singular time they’d ever fucked against a wall; it had been more ungainly than anything, outside the way Ren had held him up like he was nothing.

It doesn’t take much longer for Ren to get to the edge, a likely consequence of excitement or abstinence, or both, so Hux leans into the rapid breathing in his ear, enjoying the telltale hitch and groan of an exhale. He shifts his other hand, lax and forgotten, around the base of Ren’s nape, curling his fingers around the cord of his necklace. “Listen to you…”

“Fuck,” Ren murmurs, curling his arms in tight as he rolls his head back against Hux’s hand. His eyes are open in a glassy stare, mouth parting with a gasp and lips bruised by his own teeth. “ _Hux_.”

It’s not the first time Hux has had this urge to lean in, but he would always divert it sideways, bite at Ren’s flushed neck or murmur low in an overlarge ear. He cannot so easily disregard the impulse now; it’s stronger and fiercer, filling his mind with a resolve akin to how he’d felt waking up just in the past hour.

Ren whimpers when Hux moves to take his lips, likely in surprise, but hopefully with some satisfaction. He’s going tense barely a moment later, kissing some sort of spark as he pants heavy and loud into Hux’s mouth, spilling into a hastily cupped hand.

Hux has half a mind to make Ren clean it up, but the throbbing weight of his own erection still trapped in his jeans has him carefully turning to wipe on a towel just inside the toilet door for reasons of most arousing gagging. He ends up proudly swallowing a yelp when big hands start pawing at his crotch, and looks back in time to watch Ren fall to his knees with a thunk that _had_ to have been heard in the apartment below.

“You’re so fucking hot,” Ren says, apparently still somewhat breathless from orgasm. He slides his hands up and grips Hux tightly at the knees, giving a startling pull forward and forcing him to balance on wide shoulders. “Black skinny jeans? You’re trying to _kill_ me.”

Hux would disagree that it’s more akin to suicide, seeing how good the trousers are at keeping his hard dick trapped and aching. It hadn’t really been a concern when he’d bought them, but it’s certainly coming up as a negative now; granted, the almost worshipful way Ren is currently fondling his thighs is definitely a positive, leveling it back out into something like neutral.

Ren mutters presumable further appreciation at the front of Hux’s constricting fly as his quick fingers blessedly separate the buttons, breath soon becoming hot and perceptibly damp over the straining fabric of Hux's underwear. He shifts forward as he starts mouthing, wet and a little clumsy, at the fabric of Hux's pants, then hurriedly starts pulling at Hux's whole kit, tight jeans getting yanked a few inches down Hux's thighs as he moves forward to use his tongue with creative enthusiasm. 

Hux swallows hard, looking up to the wall with a slow inhale as it becomes rather clear Ren's slightly unconventional technique has hardly diminished. He slides one hand up into Ren's hair, cradling his bowed head and doing his best to keep his fingers loose between thick strands, ignoring the impulse to grip hard and pull, a few nagging voices at the back of his mind calling him variations of a bastard. He can’t actually remember getting an outright complaint from _Ren_ , but it must be better to err on the side of courtesy, even if he’s a few years late.

“Shit,” Hux chokes, squeezing his eyes shut and swallowing hard at the sudden heat, slick and wet, as Ren summarily swallows him down almost entire. It’s rather astonishing, and a little suspicious, though he forgets that soon as the tongue around his cock does that stupid undulating thing back into a tight throat, making him long for something better to lean against than a damned wall.

He hopes there is some excuse for the fact he can barely endure longer than a few moments, almost thankful when Ren lets up with a low cough and resumes the much less trying combination of hands and tongue. He manages to open his eyes and looks down again to watch, incidentally catching Ren's fervid eyes, and finds that the mental image he’s held for the past couple years has nothing on reality; he’s always gotten a thrill of Ren on his knees – having such big man at his feet – but it’s never been quite this _magnificent_.

He pulls tight at Ren’s hair when he gets close, attempted gentleness forgotten, only to feel Ren actually moan around his cock, swallowing him down again just at the moment he comes. He forgets to drop Ren’s head until what has to be thirty seconds later, blood pulsing through him and a heat crawling up his ears that is only partly from the orgasm – does Ren _like_ his hair being pulled? Christ.

Hux rolls his eyes to the ceiling at the usual sound of desperate spitting, drawing a hand across his own mouth just incase the small tickle of amusement grows into a laugh. He looks down once the danger is gone, tugging shortly at a lock of mussed hair. “You suck cock so well,” he murmurs, reaching forward and dragging his thumb across the smudge of spit and come on the side of Ren’s mouth, wiping it on the shoulder of his shirt. “For a man who hates the taste of come.”

Ren murmurs something unintelligible, pressing wet, sticky kisses to the crux of Hux’s hip. He peeks up through his lashes, somehow coy, “Better than those fancy fucks in Europe?”

“I barely had it off with _one_ ,” Hux corrects, sluggishly pushing Ren away and grimacing at the sight of more come unambiguous all over the front of that dark jumper. He shifts off the wall, reaching down to grab at the loose hem and yank upward. “And even that was unsatisfying.”

“Shit!” Ren yelps, his voice pitching high even as he obediently lifts his arms to let the clothing to be taken; the cross stays tragically in place, glinting off the dim hall light. He rocks back and up onto his feet in the next moment, looking up to catch Hux’s eyes as he aggressively takes the jumper back. “Really, though? I mean, that’s – I’m not sure I believe you.”

Hux feels his mouth fall open, insult pooling quickly at the back of his mind to replace the idle bliss of orgasm. “What kind of person do you think I am?”

Ren answers with a lazy shrug, spreading his arms demonstratively as he turns around toward his room. “I don’t know, one who fucks strangers at Christmas parties?”

“Excuse me,” Hux scoffs, following close and tempted to push Ren over when he kneels in front of the dresser. “We went to that party together, you boor.”

Ren shakes his head slow as he straightens, a black tee unfolding in his hands; it has an unfamiliar logo at the shoulder, red and aggressive. “Together? You just asked me for a ride because you ‘ _find public transport tedious._ ’”

Hux sighs at the awful impression of his accent, weighing if now would be the time to come clean of another, more harmless secret, but he has to keep some dignity. It’s not as if the truth there is really relevant, despite how it may have inadvertently ended them here.

“Wait,” Ren says, glancing over with a needlessly pleased look. “Unsatisfying?”

Hux rolls his eyes to the door in some attempt at diversion by exasperation. It hardly works by the hair-raising pressure of a stare, but at least there is no ensuing crawl of a chill trying to get at his thoughts.

His _technical_ infidelity had occurred barely a month into his unofficial deportation, after he’d gotten so plastered realizing he was maybe a little in love with his scam husband that his addled, embittered mind foolishly decided the best use of time would be to use some sap as a tool to fuck the sentiment out of him. In the end, nothing happened aside for said sap pouring him onto a sofa while trying to give him relationship advice, so Hux had resolved to completely bury himself in work. It was far more effective a tool for repression.

Ren suddenly makes a startled noise, sharp and distinct under his breath, and shoves past Hux at the door with a mumble under his breath, unintelligible but clearly troubled.

Hux turns and watches him walk away for a few moments, thankful at least that he’d put on real trousers, then looks back to the room to try and find the source of the trouble. His eyes catch on a glint in the bed, and he steps forward to grab his phone, dreading the data bill, then pauses on his toes to stare at the open drawer. He lasts a few long seconds, resisting the itch at the back of his mind, only to sigh heavily and lean in to shove it closed. 

And so it begins. 

“I was thinking – _Ren_!” Hux snaps, after idly turning the corner in the kitchen only to catch an _idiot_. He finds himself feeling ludicrously anxious at the sight of Ren crawling around on the counter, peering into the dark, thin spaces between ceiling and cabinets ostensibly to feel around. He doesn’t even know what he’d do if Ren fell, aside for continue to shout at him. “Get down! You’re too large for that.”

Ren rolls his eyes at the order, dropping back to the floor with a loud thump and a peculiar tablet in hand. It appears to have come from atop the cabinet, and is completely glass except for a shiny metal rim around the edge, looking to be so delicate that Hux almost wants to take it away, lest Ren crush it with his giant hands.

Hux stares at it for a few moments, as silence settles uneasily in the kitchen. He feels his expression twist finally into confusion, a peculiar discomfort manifesting at the back of his throat with little real reason. “What is that?”

“It’s – I think this is what I was doing with Snoke,” Ren mutters, taking a deep breath and abruptly shoving the tablet forward into Hux’s chest with little care for the fragile screen. It is far heavier than should be for size, with a curiously inert feel of static surrounding it. “Kind of. Look into it.”

Hux looks up with a short exhale, raising a brow, “Ren – ”

“Fuck! Do you always have to fight?" Ren shouts without warning, his voice getting strung up with a certain untimely umbrage. “Just **_look_**!”

Hux deliberately keeps his eyes off the tablet, even as a primitive thread of alarm beats through his body, to snarl back at the temperamental brat in front of him. He hasn’t heard Ren talk to him like that in _years_. “Do not speak that way if you want something, Organa.”

Ren curls back immediately with visible shame, though as his voice retains a certain sullen tone of sarcasm. “Sorry _._ ”

Hux reluctantly turns his attention to the tablet in his hand, realizing he can see right through to the floor. It leaves a faint blurry tint to the image on the other side, but otherwise? “It’s a piece of glass.”

“No, _look_ ,” Ren repeats, lifting the screen up and directing it out toward the…

The room through the glass is so unfamiliar it may as well be a different apartment. A pair of foldout tables sit in the middle, visibly scuffed and bearing various chemical paraphernalia, the air around it dingy with floating dust. He slowly peaks over the tablet, blinking at his _furniture_ , then back down to the screen. He even turns it around, but the image is just more of the same, if now showing a kitchen floor without his feet.

“What is this?” Hux asks, glancing up and catching Ren looking back with a distinctive furrow at his brow. “A security camera somewhere?”

“It’s here,” Ren says, his voice descending into a low, uneasy tone, like he expects something to jump out at him. “But over there. I guess.”

“You guess,” Hux says slowly, feeling the discomfiting sensation of something trying to become an epiphany at the back of his mind.

Ren rolls his eyes, blinking rapidly with clear irritation just to Hux’s side, then practically deflating on the next exhale as he looks up to catch Hux’s eye. “Do you remember when I tried to tell you about transworld identity and you said you weren’t high enough for that conversation?”

“No,” Hux says, blinking down at the screen again with a thick swallow. It does sound a little like him, though he has some suspicions of the circumstances. “I’m assuming we were _already_ high?”

Ren shrugs with a stilted lift of his shoulder, glancing distinctly away. “It wasn’t like, a psychotropic.”

“So glad to be a guinea pig,” Hux sighs, setting the tablet down onto the counter. He reaches up to press his thumb and finger into his eyes, drawing them inward until he’s pinching at the bridge of his nose. “From my reluctant exposure to the _fiction_ of that theory, am I to believe you’re saying that man we saw today was me. From an other world.”

“Yes,” Ren says,

Hux takes a deep breath, looking up and over his own hand to catch Ren’s eyes. “No.”

“Yes,” Ren repeats, expression bearing far too much surety for comfort, curling his lips over his teeth, “And I think… he’s come here for me.”

“What?” Hux says, hearing his own alarm pitch high and instantly mortified. 

“Not _me_ , me,” Ren says, stretching his neck slightly and glancing across the kitchen, out into the living room. He takes a deep breath, next words slow and unsure, “The other me. Who has been living here.”

Hux ignores an urge to follow the line of sight, determined to turn his voice and mood into disbelief to keep his mind from latching onto the words. He is already repressing a hysteria trying to beat forward; his idle, ignored bemusement of the apartment being so damned empty of dust shoving to the forefront of his mind. He forces a scoff he knows must come out grating. “Did you already start making drugs?”

“No! Look – “ Ren catches Hux's eye and abruptly turns at the waist, pulling at the fabric on his shoulder to draw the logo to the front. “Look at this shirt! What does this mean to you?”

“It –” Hux crosses his arms as he shifts forward, narrowing his eyes at the logo for a few seconds. He tips back on his heels as he looks back to Ren, rolling his eyes in exasperation. “Some brand I’m unfamiliar with.”

“No, this is from,” Ren leans over and pokes at the screen, “ _There_. It’s the company _they_ work for – the First Order. The only way this can be here is if he brought it."

“So why are _you_ wearing this shirt, then,” Hux says, turning to sarcasm with what seems to be instinct, a sneer crossing his mouth in a manner so quick it almost hurts. “Hoping that the ‘other me’ will get confused and take you back to their supposed ‘other world’?”

Ren looks down at the shirt again with a start, a panicky grimace crossing his face as he quickly takes a step back and grabs at the hem, pulling it over his head and throwing it to the counter. His neck bears a rare flush of embarrassment that goes down to his sternum. “No. I didn’t… think about it.”

Hux shakes his head, picking up the tablet and looking to Ren, narrowing his eyes, then walks toward the window. The image on the tablet moves with every step, and when he points it out the window, the neighborhood outside is indeed nearly the same, aside for the restaurant across the street sporting the image of a French soldier rather than a Russian. He stares at the image for a few moments longer, then looks away to concentrate on a particularly dusty corner of the window. He sets the tablet down again on the lamp table just near his elbow, and he wishes he could turn it over to somehow have it stop showing everything wrong. “Why wouldn’t you bring up this lunacy when we got here?”

Ren immediately begins to act obstinate, caught-out; a snarl forms at the corner of his mouth. “You were _tired_ , weren’t you?”

“How generous,” Hux says, curling one of his hands into a fist as he turns around to look at Ren, more from reflex to that tone than any real anger. He gestures out with the other, toward the hall that had just earlier hosted a rather pleasant encounter. “But that does lose further acceptability for your waiting, again, until after you’d accosted me for sex.”

Ren glares back for a few moments, then exhales a shaky breath and reaches up to run a hand through his hair. The look in his eyes has lost whatever attempt he had going for anger, becoming almost dim, while his shoulders fold inward as he looks into some middle distance. “I guess, I…”

Hux feels a frown settle across his mouth, something dodgy sprouting at the back of his mind. “Ren?”

“I just _forgot_ , okay? Shut up, I – ” Ren pauses, visibly swallowing, then runs his both hand through his hair again in that distinctly tic-like manner. He’s anxious, maybe even scared, and that little detail has Hux reining back a grossly sentimental compulsion to leap forward and take those hands himself. “I… I kept trying to rationalize everything, you know? Why the super and Maz talked to me, why the mail was collected, why your stuff was gone – I don’t give a shit what you say, my mom wouldn’t waste her time emptying your stuff out. It was like something obvious was beating at the inside of my head, and I tried to get it, but I didn’t… I didn’t _remember_ until I looked at the mirror and saw the shirt.”

Hux recalls the short confession on the steps with a hard swallow, “You said earlier – “  

“I can remember _flashes_ of what I did,” Ren snaps, hands curling into half-fists and gesturing up near his temples, breath getting audibly quick, brows furrowing with visible confusion and disquiet. “Nightmares of what happened in the lab, echoes of... _everything,_ but I – I somehow I forgot _what_ I was even there doing anything. It's like everything about Snoke is in some fog.”

Hux swallows thickly and fitfully straightens the loose hair at the crown of his own head; he wants to ask if it’s only been some kind of selective repression, as he's attempted and largely failed himself, but it’s ostensibly been so easily and painlessly undone. It doesn't make sense until it does, and he can feel a bitter anger rising like bile against his throat – only _one person_ gains anything from Ren misremembering what he spent doing for months in that basement. Snoke had been clever and underhanded, always condescending with his suggestions of sensibility, and far, far too interested in the rumor of Ren being able to read the minds of lying students. Hux had waved it off, but... what if Snoke was curious because he had some similar ability?

“It just doesn’t make sense – how did I _forget_ this?” Ren continues, his breath getting quicker and quicker, until it culminates in a veritable scream that echoes loud and miserable through the apartment. He covers his face with both raised hands, fingers curling inward with what seems to be a worrying intent of getting at his own eyes.

Hux is moving forward before he can even try to ignore the impulse, wrapping his hands around Ren’s wrists and pulling, though it doesn’t so much as remove the hands as it does draw Ren into his chest. He’s taut like an overborne wire, muttering quiet and unintelligible, and Hux grimaces when a pulse of _something_ beats straight into his skull.

“Am I crazy?” Ren croaks, his voice brittle and shaky, chest surging with shallow breaths that shove sharp elbows into Hux’s chest. “Is none of this real – is the mirror just _blank_?”

Hux tightens his hold and slides his hands up on broad shoulders, still cautious, then curls his fingers up and around so he might easier pull Ren closer, moving his mouth near an overlarge ear. “It’s really far more of a window.”

A weak scoff is Ren’s only response to that, though he sounds thinly relieved. His hands still cover his face, muffling any feebler sound underneath, but the slight slump of his weight indicates some tension waning.

Hux looks sidelong at the screen, sitting flat on a table, yet showing an unsettling empty space underneath to a faded, foot-worn rug. He can actually _feel_ himself quickly coming around to the idea; the last few hours of impossible lining into a comforting improbable. It won’t even be the first time he’s believed something ludicrous because Ren had a breakdown about it, which almost lends a legitimate precedence to the entire claim.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Alright,” Hux says, rolling his eyes and looking out the window again, then feeling rather foolish for the next question suddenly burning at the top of his tongue. He should just ask – it’s not like he hasn’t been ten times as sentimental just hours ago. “How was he any different with the other me at home, since you’re so learned on that.”
> 
> Ren falls abruptly quiet for a few awkward seconds, then takes a decidedly careful breath. “He uh, lived alone. Actually.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the long wait, _again_ , I'm a mess.

Hux blinks at the darkened ceiling, too lazy to turn on a lamp, and idly watches the intermittent ticks of a stoplight reflect from the street. He lifts his hand after another few seconds to gesture outward, aimlessly. “The super said he was at a conference.”

Ren responds with an unintelligible murmur, curled up on the floor with his head in his knees and leaning against Hux’s leg like he had on the stoop.

Hux chooses to ignore it and continues with a low hum. “But in _May_? It’s right before term ends.”

“I don’t know,” Ren says, lifting his head slightly to actually _speak_ , but he sounds more resentful than panicking now, which is something to be said for the last thirty minutes of incredibly tense silence. “Conferences are stupid – and it’s definitely not anything with BioMFC. Or the Metobolomics Society. He probably lied.”

“Unless you apologized,” Hux says, though he’s not quite sure that the mentioned societies, in any universe, will ever forgive Ren for his… extreme methods of disagreeing with panelists and presenters. The feuds had actually been incredibly entertaining right up until both sides started using Hux as a proxy. “How alike are you two, then?”

“I don’t…” Ren sighs, tipping his head up onto the cushion to look up dolefully at Hux, mouth in a sulking frown. “Sweaters? He wore a lot of sweaters. And glasses with black plastic frames.”

“You before Lasik?” Hux says dryly, quirking an eyebrow. He can easily recall a few memories of Ren from their first months of acquaintanceship, having actually found the specs fairly charming, which he still finds embarrassing to think despite the drastically different circumstances. “How utterly _bizarre_.”

“No, like – ” Ren rolls his eyes with clear aggravation, now looking straight up at the ceiling. “Cardigans, with big wooden buttons. Like an eighty-year-old. And – and –“

“It’s fine if you don’t remember,” Hux interrupts, wincing slightly as the words come out just _slightly_ more condescending than he intended, but it’s a very hard habit to break.

“No, I fucking do, okay?” Ren snaps, exhaling with a huff and crossing his arms between his knees and his chest; he glances over to Hux, scowling, “He’s boring, I guess. He wore kind of the same clothes, yeah, but it was all… weird.”

“Weird,” Hux repeats, feeling dubious – of course it was weird. “Are you sure it wasn’t simply uncanny?”

Ren hums a frustrated groan, until his expression suddenly shifts from petulance to amusement, eyes curving up from a repressed smile as his brow go up and he peers backward to Hux. “Like – “

“I can already tell this is at my expense,” Hux sighs, lifting a hand and pressing a pair of fingers against the bridge of his nose.

“Like how you dressed on your first day of teaching, you know?” Ren drops his head back to his chest and shrugs, a laugh coloring his voice, “Trying to be a normal person, but then ending up just looking sort of weird and uncomfortable? Except that’s him all the time.”

“To begin with,” Hux says, letting his hand fall to his lap and rolling his eyes downward to glare at the back of Ren’s head. “ _My_ first class didn’t start rumors I was a cultist –”

“That was half your fault,” Ren argues, pointedly lifting the pendant from his collarbone to flip it between his fingers, a smirk at the sparest visible corner of his mouth.

“And secondly,” Hux continues, turning his hand to poke at the soft skin of Ren’s bare shoulder. “That is you all the time.”

Ren takes a deep breath, uncrossing his arms from his knees just to gesture angrily forward with a sharp descent. “It’s _not_. The _same_.”

“Fine,” Hux says, fairly certain his voice is sign enough of his frustration.

“Whatever,” Ren mutters, his ire practically evaporating into a low sigh. “You’ll just know.”

“Of course I’ll know,” Hux snaps, trying and failing not to feel insulted by the suggestion otherwise. “But will anyone else? Because it sounds like _no one_ in the building did.”

“I didn’t see him talk to many people, okay?” Ren says, shoulders curling up around his head in visible discomfort; he’d likely be retreating into his shirt, if he’d ever went to get another one. “I worked at Snoke’s nights and the only place I ever saw him was here when you weren’t home, so that didn’t lead to a lot of… observational crossover.”

Hux narrows his eyes. “I can’t tell if that’s another of your bad jokes.”

“It isn’t,” Ren says, though his voice lowers into a rather pleased mumble, “ _Wasn’t_.”

“Alright,” Hux says, rolling his eyes and looking out the window again, then feeling rather foolish for the next question suddenly burning at the top of his tongue. He should just ask – it’s not like he hasn’t been ten times as sentimental just hours ago. “How was he any different with the other me at home, since you’re so learned on _that_.”

Ren falls abruptly quiet for a few awkward seconds, then takes a decidedly careful breath. “He uh, lived alone. Actually.”

Hux stares down at the uncomfortable picture Ren makes, then looks back up to their fuzzy reflection in the television. He doesn’t know why, but he had assumed that their counterparts had enjoyed a slightly different relationship – the sort that would lead to one of them going through a dangerous portal to another universe to get the other back.

He has _perhaps_ seen too many films.

“I didn’t actually bring that thing home until I tried to track him down at his lab, to see what he worked on,” Ren says, glancing over shiftily up in the direction of the tablet, still next to the lamp stand. He sighs with a low groan, “But the First Order building is in a place that’s a warehouse here, so I – His lab was impossible to get to. I saw some people he worked with, but he ignored most of them.”

Hux hums his response in a flat tone, unsurprised by some measure. Ren wasn’t _quite_ antisocial, but Hux has seen him get to a point where he’d scare certain people off rather than talk to them; the situation at SKB had been some evidence of that being a stubborn behavior.

Ren clears his throat, “You do work there too, but I only saw you once, and we… They didn’t seem to get along. For real.”

Hux raises his brows, bitterly swallowing back even more discontent. He knows – he _knows –_ that Ren and he only came together due to extenuating circumstances, but it still rankles to hear it going so far the other way in different conditions, and especially with Skywalker’s taunting still so fresh in his mind. They were, physically, very compatible before he abruptly wrote up the scam, and clearly grew otherwise in the interim, so he doesn’t appreciate all this existential objection to the idea. 

Ren leans further into his own knees, outright hunching. “You were like a bodyguard, kind of, who kills people. From what I heard.”

“ _Kills_ people?” Hux repeats, feeling that dissatisfaction grow into outright incredulity at the back of his mind.

“They were having a fight in the lobby,” Ren continues, “I wasn’t – _he_ shouldn’t have been able to schedule you for some assignment, no matter how dangerous it was, since you were going back to London for… ” He goes silent suddenly, almost uncomfortably reticent for a few moments that lead to a deep breath, though his voice is now little more than a mutter. “Because you were getting married at some fancy church, which I – _he_ had known about from a prior conversation. That’s all I know about you.”

Hux gets the distinct impression that’s a lie, but is too stunned to challenge it. The fact it wasn't to Ren is one thing, but he can hardly wrap his mind around any version of himself that would have anything so dramatic as a destination wedding, let alone back in _England._ His own ceremony had been little more than a small, slightly awkward courthouse affair in Cambridge, but it had been personal, and even in his most maudlin moments he had never imagined more to it than the addition of a real honeymoon. He has even decided on setting the fantasy somewhere warm, despite personal preference, getting far too attached to idle fantasies of Ren on beaches while he was in Europe.

Honestly though, he thinks even _that_ wistfulness could merely be hindsight on all the anxiety during preparation for his final dissertation defense, which had been his highest concern for the first four months of their marriage. He does acknowledge now that he probably shouldn’t have applied for the student VISA in the first place, but self-sabotage always rears its ugly head – he should just be glad he hasn’t gotten quite so bad with it as Ren.

It all worked out, technically, and he’s not even sure who it could happen to be otherwise, even if… Wait, didn’t Ren say he had – _No_. He wouldn’t have taken it that far. Hux had never felt even an inkling of attraction to Mitaka, who had been completely off-limits, anyway, and literally nothing like…

 _Actually_ , it seems entirely too possible now that Ren would take that personally. Good lord, was it really another universe’s bad choices that drove Ren to volunteer the boy for an experiment that ended so grisly?  

“Was he marrying Mitaka?” Hux asks, forcing himself to confront it, lest he swallow the question back up and let it settle into a bitterness. Again.

The look Ren sends upward is absolutely heartbroken, his eyes going wide and mouth falling half-open in shock. It’s almost enough to make Hux regret asking anything, though it does answer the question in tidy order.

“I’m not asking because I wanted to!” Hux snaps, feeling dismay burning at his ears. “You said you had something against him enough to want him _dead_ , and this is a fair suspect.”

“I – I didn’t want him dead,” Ren denies, looking down again with a stilted shrug, as if this is something he can just brush off – as if, because he didn’t mean to do it, he should be guiltless. “Just gone. I thought you might… think about things.”

“Jesus Christ, Ren, I had absolutely no interest in him,” Hux says, leaning back into the sofa and pressing the heel of his hand to his brow in abject disbelief. He unknowingly abetted the… Good Lord, would _any_ of this even have happened, if he’d just been a little less restrained? “He knew I was married – not to mention was _terrified_ of you, especially after what you pulled on Halloween.”

Ren makes an outraged noise: some pitchy, almost scoff. “You thought that was funny!”

Hux suppresses the kneejerk denial, biting his lower lip painfully between his teeth. It _had_ been absolutely hysterical, watching Mitaka shriek and stumble into a couple of fragile beakers at the sight of Ren with his face painted like a grisly, demonic skull. He rolls his eyes against the memory, exhaling softly, then reaches out to tug at an errant curl, drawing it around Ren’s ear from the back. “My feelings don’t excuse your stupid decisions.”

“Do a little,” Ren mutters, his scowl almost audible for all his face is turned away.

“I can’t believe you’re –” Hux takes a deep breath, gritting his teeth against an uncalled-for flush of embarrassment; it’s not like Ren doesn’t already know this somewhere deep in that stupid head. “He wasn’t my type. Alright?”

“You have a _type_?” Ren asks, his tone awkward around the words, like he can’t quite believe the idea.

“Yes,” Hux says, feeling his mouth fall into a frown, narrowing his eyes at the back of Ren’s head in disbelief. “Doesn’t everyone?”

“I don’t,” Ren says, dropping his head back onto the cushion and staring upside down at Hux, a single brow going up. “Into me is… good. I assume yours is mostly low self-esteem.”

Hux kicks his foot sideways, digging his heel just next to the hollow of a hip. “Don’t be an ass.”

“How wasn’t he your ‘ _type’_?” Ren asks, his voice some sullen, petulant version of mocking. He turns around at the waist, an arm curling around Hux’s knee even as he glares, “He did everything you wanted.”

“I don’t know – he was…  It would’ve hardly been very _satisfying_ ,” Hux says, trying to grasp at reasons other than the numerous physical ones that flood his mind; he needs something more profound. He glances away from Ren’s disbelieving stare, shrugging tightly, “I know he was always falling over himself to oblige me, but that has the sort of implication that if anything went further, it would be entirely because I wanted it. It isn’t about compatibility at that point, it’s just… out-and-out servitude, which is fine for an assistant, but not so much a partner.”

Ren scoffs under his breath. “I thought you were into – “

“Okay, fine,” Hux interrupts, hearing his own voice become clipped and short, “He was a consistently disturbing nine on a one-to-ten scale, while you’re about a two that can train up to a very satisfying seven at the appropriate times – plus your height and mass are nearly full marks. It is really no competition.”

A tense silence settles over them for a few seconds, if only on Hux’s end, as he ignores a surge of mortification that threatens to completely overtake him. He could have just said he never looked twice at Mitaka because he had Ren, but no, he had to turn it into something insane.

“Holy shit,” Ren says, his pout reversing into a smirk that seems to wind up into his eyes. “You have a _ranking system_?”

Hux feels a scowl biting hard at the corner of his mouth, then turns his foot to shove it again into soft flesh. He’s trying to be sincere here, but Ren is just being a bastard, and he of all people knows well enough that Hux feels most comfortable with quantifiable numbers.

“Ow,” Ren huffs, reaching out and grabbing Hux’s ankle, curling a wide palm around the top of his foot. “Stop it.”

“Not to mention,” Hux continues, making a show of trying to free his limbs for further assault, though not quite willing to jerk away as he’d need to; he ends up reaching out to a shove at the ball of Ren’s more accessible shoulder. “I’d been fucking _you_ for near three years before I met him – give me some bloody credit for decency.”

“Height and mass – are you calling me hot?”

“I would never,” Hux mutters, shifting his hand and sliding his fingers fully into Ren’s hair, along the crown of his head and down around the opposite ear. He’s become such a sap; he can’t believe how much he missed something they’d never even done.  

A harsh jingle of keys interrupts the soft mood, followed by an unmistakable slam of said keys onto a wood floor, because Hux has quite possibly the worst luck. He pulls quickly away from Ren and looks over the back of the sofa, feeling his heartbeat pick up as a familiar voice curses in the hall. The sound is indescribably eerie, to hear something and know the man saying it is definitely right in front of him.

“Shit,” Hux mutters, mostly to himself, and stumbles on half-numb legs to his bag. He hesitates with his hand over the zipper, glancing backward, but forces himself to order his priorities as he reaches inside; Ren might overreact _now_ , but he’ll –

“A gun!” Ren hisses immediately, his eyes widening so quickly that Hux knows for certain that yelling would definitely be happening, if it weren’t for the soft click of the lock tumbler. “What are you doing with a _gun_?!”

Hux gestures in front of his own neck with his empty hand, urging Ren to be quiet, which only seems to encourage the bastard into more flailing signals of anger. He rolls his eyes, trying to concentrate on exasperation rather than the panic ebbing its way up his throat as the door swings open.

He almost stands up right away, but catches himself and instead listens to the door click closed again, _then_ takes a deep, steadying breath, flicking off the safety just as he forces himself to his feet. “ _Don’t move_!”

The man in front of him obeys immediately, hands flying up in shock as his leather satchel and keys fall with a crash to the floor. He is far less familiar than Hux had expected – definitely Ren, but if something about him had stepped a few too many steps to the side. He’s reminded some of his first impression in the hospital, seeing Ren all wrong, but here augmented with the knowledge it truly isn’t him.

Undeniably, the doppelgänger _is_ wearing an absolutely abominable wool jumper and a pair of plastic-framed glasses, so Ren’s descriptions were well-enough accurate. He’s also a bit of a klutz, trying to flee and nearly falling over his own bag straps.

“I said don’t move,” Hux snaps, looking at the fool now two steps too far to the left. “I’m going to call you Ben, I hope – “

“Kylo,” he interrupts, shiftily straightening his glasses. “Don’t – I don’t like Ben.”

“Alright, _Kylo_ ,” Hux repeats, trying to recall if Ren had ever mentioned such a name, but coming up with little to go on – he knows where Ren came from, but this? He wishes it were appropriate to ask, but that might seem more friendly than hostile. “You’re going to explain to me what you’ve been doing and how you’ve managed to hide from Ren’s family, then you’re going to contact me.”

Kylo narrows his eyes, voice almost insultingly suspicious. "You?"

Hux feels the muscles in his jaw go tense. “The _me_ from wherever _you_ are from. Obviously.”

“The mercenary,” Ren adds, finally seeing to scramble up from the floor with little attempt at dignity, though he seems to surprise Kylo nonetheless by the abrupt straightening of his back. Ren looks more awkward than Hux had hoped for, but it’s within an acceptable degree. “With your company.”

Kylo glances back and forth between Hux and Ren, brows slowly furrowing, “How?”

“Call the bastard – text him?” Hux says, shrugging carelessly and feeling that slick sensation of superiority that he’s discovered comes from threatening people with grievous bodily harm. He tries not to linger on what Ren might be picking up of it, or what he might think. “I could hardly care, as long as you do it. He stole my hire car.”

Kylo’s expression wavers slightly from the gun, his eyes going wide and darting to the floor as he takes a deep breath. “You’ve seen him?”

“I just said I had,” Hux says, tilting his head and forcing his mouth into a dissatisfied frown. He’s used it to some effect on idiots with too much money. “Do you have a hearing problem?”

“No, I don’t – _wait_! Stop it,” Kylo shouts out of quite literally nowhere, his voice echoing in the room as his eyes suddenly squeeze shut. He reaches up to physically grab his head, hands curling into claws at his ears. “Don’t!”

A low groan forces Hux’s attention sideways, and he finds Ren in a similar state of suffering, one hand white knuckled at his side as the other presses hard into his brow, expression twisting in pain. He hunches over an instant later, the noise escaping his mouth almost animalistic as both hands now clutching at his temples in closed fists.

Hux’s mouth drops open with realization, aghast, “Did you try to read his mind?”

“Shut up,” Ren grinds out between clenched teeth, opening his eyes despite visible pain to glare. “It rea- It _really_ hurts.”

“Good lord, one of your eyes is – ” Hux trails off, glancing across Ren’s face and reaching out to grasp across his cheekbone, holding him steady. His left eye looks terrible, vessels bursting out and flooding over the sclera with red, and Hux can feel a sour panic rise at this back of his throat. “Stop doing it, Ren!  _Stop_.”

“I did,” Ren mumbles, his voice little more than a tight whimper, rocking forward into Hux’s hand. “I did.”

“You,” Hux barks, reluctantly turning around to point the gun back at Kylo, leaning into Ren when he feels him curl bodily into his back.

“Not me,” Kylo says, raising his hands again in apparent reflex when the barrel goes steady on his face. He grimaces tightly, glancing past Hux to Ren, then back to the gun. “It’s feedback – an _echo_. Our minds aren’t meant to-to meet, I guess.”

Hux can see little more lingering effects than a shaking hand on him. “Why isn’t it effecting you, then?”

“I’m uh, not – ” Kylo pauses briefly, but the the weapon in front of him seems to successfully spur on better explanation by the visible swallow, panicky darting eyes across the room. “I’ve participated in studies testing my thresholds. I’ve had worse.”

Hux stares for a long few moments, finding himself overcome with something like embarrassment, something like shock, and thoroughly unsure what to say after that sort of confession. He ends up reaching backward stiffly, uncurling one of his hands from the gun to twist in Ren’s jumper. “You?”

Ren shakes his head into Hux’s shoulder blade, voice muffled to the point of unintelligibility as he gives a tight negative.

Kylo clears his throat, eyes still darting back and forth between the gun and the floor in some dance between fear and discomfort. “What do you even want?”

“I believe I already told you,” Hux reminds, grudgingly focusing back on the impossible elements of the room, rather than giving into the stupid little voice shrieking at him that Ren is trembling. He hesitantly drops the gun, pointing it at the floor with a small shrug. “After that? Maybe I’ll just shoot you. It might even be cathartic.”

A short jab to the ribs is proof enough that Ren isn’t too out of sorts not to be offended. He even shifts after another moment, though not quite away, one of his hands still leaving wrinkles in the back of Hux’s shirt. “Talk,” he says over Hux’s shoulder, pained voice colored by some snarling attempt to be frightening.

Kylo responds with an uncanny imitation of the sneer that is very likely behind Hux’s back. “I’ve been doing R&D for a private company – nothing that could be connected to you.”

“For Snoke,” Hux guesses, because there is really only the one option.

Kylo is quiet for a telling few seconds, then exhales shortly, rolling his eyes in a distinctly familiar manner as he pushes his glasses up again. He seems to almost be relaxing now, which is irritating, but there’s not much Hux can do about it.

“Fuck,” Ren mutters, his forehead thumping neatly onto Hux’s shoulder.

“You’re not even supposed to be here,” Kylo mutters, lifting both hands and pressing the heels of them hard to his forehead, breath starting to come in panting gasps; he’s definitely feeling _some_ kind of pain in reprisal of earlier, even if it's only emotional. “I don’t understand why the conditioning fell apart.”

Ren practically growls from behind Hux, who feels large hands first solidly spanning his back and then curling into his shirt. “You did that to me?”

“Obviously,” Kylo spits, looking up from his brooding with a worryingly familiar rage splitting across his features. “You were meant to forget everything.”

“The trigger was your own shirt,” Ren snarls back, losing some of his diffidence to point around Hux at the lump of black cloth in the kitchen; he’s apparently unable to recognize to the signs of his own breaking. “Incompetent _moron_.”

“Alright, Ren,” Hux says, reaching backward and patting him on the side.

“I didn’t know you had the same,” Kylo says, hastily gesturing at his own temple with an tremulous hand, his voice quickly nearing that booming shout of fury, also known as: stage two of a typical tantrum. “Snoke didn’t either – he said all I’d need to do was take your memory, replace you, and you’d be gone. I _wasn’t **prepared**_ for – ”

“He clearly intended that,” Hux interrupts with a snap, his own anger overcoming sensibility. He can hardly stand hearing Snoke’s name anymore, let alone with that deferential tone Ren once used. “Manipulating his way across two damned universes for a damned experiment – a human dog fight.”

“Hux,” Ren mutters, as if he has any right to be reproachful.

“No, he…” Kylo trails off, shaking his head, his breath still coming in troublingly shaky huffs. He seems to almost raise his hand, then thinks better of it, continuing to shake his head.  “No. He’s fighting the immoral people at the First Order, readying the – He… he wouldn’t _keep_ that information from me.”

“Snoke is just a twisted old man – ” Hux nearly bites his tongue in two as a familiar, cool sensation begins to resonate agonizingly under his skull; it’s unsteady and prickling to the point of almost pain, like his mind is being scraped across to bone. It is nothing like the subtle wisp of Ren.

“ ** _Drop the gun_** ,” Kylo says, his voice somehow both a whisper and an outright shout. “ ** _Sit down_.** ”

Hux feels his expression go lax, as suddenly the only thing that matters in the world is that voice, reverberating inarguably around and between his ears. He finds himself dropping to the floor with a thud, the gun a clank of metal against wood at his side. He manages to spare an instant of panic for the safety, but most of his mind is still concerned with making sure he’s sitting down. He blinks widely, helpless as he watches Kylo gather something in the kitchen, apparently the shirt, then feels his blood run cold when Kylo stops to look back from the doorway.

“Please, don’t tell Armitage,” Kylo says, hovering somehow awkwardly despite having every centimeter of upper hand. He hastily shoves his glasses up his nose, sighing almost with exasperation as he begins to step backward, slow; he’s wearing a pair of Ren’s old boots. “He’ll kill me.”

The spell seems to break within just moments of the door shutting, but Hux is so nauseous that he doesn’t even attempt to stand. Kylo didn’t think to take the gun, at least, which is enough proof he’s got no idea what he’s doing. The realization is worse than it should be, but perhaps that’s at the thought that someone so ill-equipped and outright gutless had so easily ruined his life.

“Well,” he croaks, once he’s able to move without wanting to retch, reaching up and dabbing at the wet mess of blood creeping under his nose. “That was a nightmare.”

“Jackass,” Ren adds, his voice absolutely furious, yet shaky; he shoves at the couch, but it only moves a few scraping inches across the floor. The result seems just to make him angrier. “Cheating goddamn mother _fucker_. Should have shot him when he walked in.”

Hux manages to force himself to stand, stumbling toward the kitchen and looking for any towels near the sink as Ren continues muttering angry noises. He grimaces and grabs a dingy dishrag, the only thing immediately available, and presses it to his nose. “Can you do that?”

Ren goes quiet for a long minute, and when Hux turns to looks at him, he's staring down at his folded knees. He looks up with a determined pinch at his mouth. “Yes.”

“Have you before?” Hux asks dubiously, fairly certain the answer is negative. His eyes catch on the fallen gun, and he rushes forward – blinking back renewed dizziness – to reach down and flick the safety back on, hastily shoving it back into his pack before Ren can remember to ask questions.

“It doesn’t really – I mean,” Ren pauses for a moment, gaze dropping as a grimace crosses his lips, then drawing back up when Hux steps in front of him. “I thought about it, like Professor X, alright? But it never _worked_.”

“Ah,” Hux says, kneeling down and using his free hand to take Ren by the chin, taking his time now to consider that eye with a grimace. It likely won’t do more than ache, but it looks absolutely grisly.

“He said he was experimented on,” Ren says, shifting obediently with the manhandling, even looking up and down when directed. “Do you think that’s why?”

Hux hums in bitter agreement, reluctantly releasing Ren from his grasp. “Probably.”

Ren stands up with a heaving sigh, rubbing at his forehead and then looking around, a curdling anxiety across his face. “I need to call Rey. They might have caught – ”

The knock on the door is such a surprise that Hux nearly reaches out to shove Ren back to the ground. He stares at it a few seconds, frozen and knowing beyond a doubt that Kylo wouldn’t simply knock, and likely neither his murderous doppelgänger, but the thought manifests through his mind and refuses to shift.

“Yeah?” Ren responds a moment later, because he’s an utter ass with no self-preservation instinct.

“It’s Agent Skywalker,” Skywalker calls through the door. “Do neither of you know what a phone sounds like?”

Hux feels his expression collapse into shock, then reaches when Ren actually stumbles past him to get to the door, stopping him with a pair of hooked fingers into his elbow. “Is she psychic?”

“I don’t know,” Ren mutters, expression twisting into a frown as he reaches out with the other to wrap around the door handle. “Today is the most I’ve ever talked to her.”

“So helpful,” Hux says, dropping the dishrag to the counter with a glance downward. He doesn’t need to look infirm with the FBI sniffing around, though it’ll do little good pretending if she can see the bloody _future_. “As always.”

“It’s not like you know anything about your shitty family,” Ren says, turning around at the waist to speak in an entirely rude condescending tone; he still hasn’t opened the door, he must be stalling. “You told me once you don’t know if your father had horses or _brothers_ growing up.”

“I know that neither option involves psychics,” Hux snaps, ignoring the little hysterical part of his mind that thinks a horse appearing right about now would hardly be unusual compared to the rest of the day. He would at least have some mode of transportation at that point.

“I can hear you,” Skywalker calls through the door, needlessly knocking again with two sharp raps. “The soundproofing in your building is awful.”

“Why are you even here,” Ren says as he finally pulls open the door, his voice assuming an entirely fabricated arrogance, “Don’t you need a warrant?” 

“No, I’m not – why are you shirtless? What happened to your _eye_?”  Skywalker gasps, leaning into Ren with a grimace, teeth visibly clenching and eyes narrowing in sympathy, at least until her expression suddenly falls far more disapproving. “Are you making drugs again?”

Ren immediately looks insulted, a snarl of outrage crossing his face, but it’s an expression Hux has seen enough to know is completely artificial. It’s the same look he used to give other researchers when he was abusing communal resources, right before he’d call upon Hux to lie for him with the aghast expression he’s now currently turning sideways.

“We’ve been asleep,” Hux says, sighing heavily and reaching up to slide a hand through his hair, trying to act like he’s just gotten up. It’s only until he tries to catch her eye that he realizes she might take it as some evidence of… _overexertion_ , and awkwardly clears his throat, glancing further past her. “Why have you brought Mr Finnemore?”

“Poe recruited him,” Skywalker says, seemingly glad for the change of topic as she turns, gesturing for Finn to move from where he still stands, visibly reluctant, in the hall.

Hux narrows his eyes, exhaling a disbelieving scoff. “Excuse me?”

Ren leans in toward Hux as he retreats backward from the door, sharing a mocking hum. “He’ll definitely be more use than you.”

Hux follows him as he moves, then reaches out with a quick pair of fingers and tweaks hard at an exposed nipple.  

“ _Christ_ ,” Ren squeaks, darting backward and covering his chest in an outright comical manner.

“Go find a shirt,” Hux says, clearing his throat of an idle laugh and pointing backward, then snapping his fingers slightly when Ren just continues to sulk. “Now.”

“Fuck you,” Ren says, exhaling a petulant huff and sliding around behind Hux, giving a ludicrous berth. It could almost be real anger, if ignoring the tight press of his lips to suppress a leering smirk. “Asshole.”

Hux rolls his eyes, then looks back to find Skywalker somehow confused, her eyes narrowed and staring over his shoulder. He ignores the heat crawling against his nape and clears his throat, drawing her attention. “Have you come to return my car, then?”

“The vehicle is in impound,” Skywalker says flatly, “You cannot have it back; it’s _obviously_ evidence.”

Hux nods slowly, tilting his head just slightly, “I see, so you’re here just to ruin my night.”

“No,” Skywalker says, her mouth pinching with her own share of irritation. She glances sideways at Finn, who looks away, “ _We_ thought it might be better to ask you if you know anything about your twin. He’s fled.”

“I would think after investigating me,” Hux says, making sure to speak as slowly as possible. “You would know I don’t have any siblings, let alone a twin.”

“On record, yes, but – ”

“You had Hux get me out just to show me a picture of something impossible,” Ren interrupts, crossing back in front of Hux to go toward the sofa, now wearing a faded tee and carrying a pair of boots in hand. “Are you really that close-minded?”

“You expect me to…” Skywalker shakes her head, taking a deep breath and almost pointedly glancing toward the door, mouth pursing with visible consternation at the mere idea of entertaining Ren’s hint. “He told Finn that he was Dr. Hux’s brother, which is far more _realistic_ than whatever it is you're thinking. I am just here to ask if he’s on the run for any particular reason.”

“There’s another me, too,” Ren says, outright ignoring the statement and barely sparing a look up as he starts lacing, fingers slightly clumsy as he secures tidy knots to the corners of each boot; Hux has no idea where exactly Ren thinks he’ll be going. “He’s from the same place as the guy you’re after now.”

Skywalker takes a thoroughly vexed breath. 

“He goes by Kylo, and he’s…” Ren looks up from his boots and leans back on the sofa, running a hand through his hair as his mouth pinches into a flat line. He stands up, still speaking, and reaches for the tablet. “Much better at what I do.”

“Better,” Skywalker repeats, reluctant acceptance finally creeping into her expression. She slowly lifts the tablet up for Finn and her to peek through, predictable confusion coloring her twisting expression. “What is this?”

“The other side,” Ren says, taking a step back and glancing to Hux, then slightly down, like he’s expecting punishment for doing something sensible.

“It's… messy,” Skywalker says, looking like something of a fool as she spins around to see the entire apartment, pausing only slightly at the window, then dropping it back down to the floor. “And a little sad.”

“A little,” Hux repeats, feeling a mocking scoff works its way up his throat.

“But,” Finn says, looking over the tablet and focusing abruptly on Ren. “What is it you _do?_ Unless you just meant being able to build this.”

Ren rolls his eyes, a tight grimace flashing quick across his face as he slides a hand through his hair; his eventual answer is given with an _almost_ dismissive tone, if a little quiet. “Minor ESP. Like… telepathy.”

“So that _was_ true?” Finn exclaims, slightly less surprised than expected, though his eyes go wide and dart over to Skywalker, evidently somehow aware of the family tie; then again, he’s apparently been with the agents for _hours_. “Can you do that?”

“Of course not,” Skywalker says, with an oddly flashy huff of laughter for the completely rational concern for an irrational circumstance. “It’s just _him_. And our grandfather, rumor is.”

Hux raises an eyebrow slowly, then glances over to find Ren similarly suspicious. It’s a relief to see that he probably wasn’t just lied to, but it doesn’t exactly put his mind to rest on _her_.

“ _That was true’_ ,” Hux repeats, after the silence settles into something far too heavy. “What exactly does that mean?”

Finn glances briefly between Hux and Ren, then over to Skywalker, an awkward, slanting smile across his face. “There were - _are_ some weird rumors. About it.”

“Ah…” Hux intones, belatedly recalling the one or two, or ten, stories of Ren somehow catching students in their bids to extend deadlines through false emergencies. He’d been faced with the rumor himself, but obviously it was hardly so genuine. “Professor Polygraph – how could I have forgotten _that_?”

“They shouldn’t have lied to begin with,” Ren says, unabashed at his behavior even now. “I barely cared about teaching, let alone _due dates_.”

“Can we please stay on task,” Skywalker interjects, leaning forward to shove the tablet back to Hux, apparently unaware of Finn’s quite obvious distress at the loss. “What is it he can possibly do worse?”

“He can get in your head and _make_ you do things,” Ren explains, his voice almost too flat as he speaks, gesturing up at his own temple with a slow, even breath, then dropping the hand back to become a fist at his side. “Rewrite thoughts, rather than just read them.”

Skywalker stares for a few moments, perhaps looking between Ren and Hux for some sort of dissension, then peeks unsubtly around the apartment, as if seeking some proof otherwise from the curtains. “How could you even know that – Did he attack you?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Hux admits, peering sidelong to the barely-hidden bloody rag, but reluctant to make a demonstration of it. He looks back up, epiphany provoking him to glare straight at Skywalker. “ _Actually_ , he’s been rather successfully assuming Ren’s life, right under your family’s collective noses. Could you explain that?”

“Hux,” Ren mutters, low and almost like he’s embarrassed. 

“Here?” Skywalker says, her expression transforming to something vaguely horrified before shifting back to professionally inscrutable, shaking her head. “No. It’s not possible.”

Hux ignores the doubtful tone, his own shame burning at the back of his ears, and gestures toward the door. “Regardless of your opinion, he _was_ , and rather surprised to see us as much as we were him. He then expressed some dread the Armitage Hux that he knew might be within driving distance, forcing us off our feet to flee like a _coward_.”

Skywalker goes quiet for a few seconds, likely trying to determine which part of the story to question, then finally exhales a short, disbelieving breath. “The twin is one thing, but -? Are you telling me two men traveled somehow from – from…”

Hux glances sideways to silence Ren’s gearing explanation as he opens his own mouth. “Technically, it could be a separate timeline, though we have no idea – ”

“Another universe,” Finn interrupts, clearing his throat and looking to the side when Hux looks over to glare. “Or a plane, maybe – there’s a lot of studies about it. Theoretical ones.” He glances down to the tablet in Hux’s hand, expression twisting up in discomfort. “Only also real, apparently…”

Skywalker seems somehow more satisfied with the response when coming from a bloody student, which explains so much about the American government. “So the other _you_ fled here from another universe, just to get away from the other Dr. Hux?”

“Hah,” Ren says flatly, his tone, rather gratifyingly, without humor. "No."

“From what we could glean, my counterpart might be a…” Hux pauses, realizing that he’s not quite sure how to put it, and slightly eager to test her. If she picks up on something vague, then it’s a fair answer; although, she has _seemed_ surprised enough the last few minutes of disclosure. “A _cleaner_ for an organization that dabbled in the sort of thing that enabled them to come here at all. He’s come to take him back.”

Skywalker is quiet for few moments, but all she does is exchange some unreadable look with Finn. “Alright?”

“Or kill him,” Ren mutters, clearing his throat and completely ignoring Hux’s attempt to catch his eyes in a furious glare.

Rey is frozen for a beat of silence, then takes a shallow, surprised inhale, her eyebrows going up her forehead. She points at Hux with a flat handed gesture, very clearly frustrated – maybe her power isn’t so specific. “You couldn’t just _say_ assassin?”  

Finn raises one brow as the opposite eye narrows, his head tilting one way, then the other; his gaze darts down to Hux’s trousers, his sneakers, then clearly focuses on to his unkempt hair.

It gives Hux the uncanny urge to nudge his bag, and _gun_ , further behind his feet. He doesn’t particularly need such controversial evidence so obvious at his feet, if Finn actually accuses him of being his own double. He looks to back to Skywalker, disguising his discomfort with a scoff, “Is ‘ _cleaner’_ not a familiar term within your FBI, Agent Skywalker?”

“I can’t believe this,” Skywalker snarls after a few more tense seconds, taking a deep, somehow condemning breath. She turns around, running the heel of her hand over her forehead and looking ready to pace. “I need to call Poe – he’s after this guy for tires and doesn’t even know what he is.”

Hux idly watches Skywalker tap commands into her phone, glances over to find Finn peak into the tablet, and feels his expression curl unheeded with barely repressed vehemence. He shouldn't be anywhere near any of this ludicrous situation, as far back as keeping up better with Ren's little extra-curriculars - he should be at his damned _house,_ on a satisfyingly-enough remote island, and fighting with Ren about base solutions in the bloody cookery.

“Hey,” Ren mutters, a large hand curling like a shock around Hux's fingers. “That's what the ring is for, remember?”

Hux looks down with a start, finding bright red indents of his own nails in the heel of his palm, and grits his teeth with a determined scowl; great, he's doing that again, too. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part of this fic featuring dork!Kylo sketched by [the awesome inchells](https://twitter.com/inchells/status/923087748738584576)


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ren gives an odd grimace, tipping his head for a short moment as he bends down to pick up the condom box, practically fidgeting. “You were asleep a really long time.”
> 
> “So you left?” Hux says, horrified to hear his own voice pitch dangerously close to a creak. The split second thought of waking in their apartment, in Ren’s old room, and alone, is startlingly awful.
> 
> A strange silence settles across the room, until Ren takes a sharp breath and scratches a hand through his hair, dragging his fingers back down his face in clear attempt to hide his expression. “I – yeah.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I will admit at the front here that this is basically half a chapter, but it's like _9k words_ , so I figured I could post it and make the update not look obnoxiously long (and also not drag it out another month)? It is mostly fluff (smut, conversation), but it does have a couple thousand words of action relating to the continuing plot. 
> 
> Sorry for the long wait. I got a full-time job with an hour and half commute, so it leaves a lot of time for thinking, but not writing ;-;

“We should not be the ones in custody,” Hux says, relieved to hear his voice emerge level even as he tightens his hands over his knees with a low exhale. He absolutely loathes sitting in the back seat of a car; it’s unreasonably worse than any sort of bus. “You have no probable cause.”

Skywalker practically growls, the corner of her mouth visibly in a glower at the windshield. “It is protective, Dr. Hux.”

Hux opens his mouth to argue, only to tense as Skywalker swings out in front of a lorry without bothering to peek in a single mirror. He had no idea that driving style could be so genetic. 

“You're not in a cell, are you?” Skywalker asks primly, her tone a frustratingly good replication of the Senator’s at her most condescending. 

Hux rolls his eyes, biting his tongue for a short moment before deciding that he really doesn’t care about the symbolic power she might currently hold over him. “No, I’m simply about to be put in one, aren’t I?”

Ren clears his throat, daring to sound embarrassed. “Hux.”

“Fuck _off_ , Ren,” Hux snaps, mostly on reflex, only to look over to his side with a quick glance and feel a mild pang of guilt. He may’ve been a bit too sharp, if judging by the sulking toward the window and the abruptly deep set scowl.

“Look,” Skywalker says, her foot hitting unnecessarily hard on the brake at the signal. She turns around completely in her seat, alarming even Finn by his wide-set grimace, though she doesn’t seem to notice in her ire. “I don’t like you, and a small part of me would love to let you die, but I can’t – it’s my job to stop it. And you’re technically family.”

Hux steels his jaw, waiting until the car is moving again to respond. “Unprofessional.”

“I know!” Skywalker agrees loudly, with an audible squeeze around the leather wheel, seams creaking against her ire. “Now pick a hotel. We can resume this in the morning.”

Hux is sure he’s heard wrong, trying to reorder the sounds into different words, only to simply end up exhaling in disbelief. A hotel? She’s just taking them to a _hotel_? She should take them to a damned rental car agency instead, let them run off themselves without this needles inquiry.

Ren clears his throat, rejoining the conversation with a low mutter. “Boston Harbor,”

“What?” Hux looks over with a startled blink.

“I’ve walked past it a couple times,” Ren explains, shrugging shortly and tapping at the door handle, still staring out the window. “And I remember Mother saying it was nice.”

“As long a you pay,” Skywalker says, her frustrated tone fading with every next word. She glances up again through the mirror at the next signal, her smugness turned straight at Hux. “Care to argue some more, Doctor?”

Hux turns with gritted teeth to his own window, shifting back into the seat and trying to force his jaw to unclench. He doesn’t even know what this hotel is – Ren hasn’t mentioned it before, despite it ostensibly being on the tip of his tongue, let alone expressed some desire to patronize it. It's difficult not to let _that_ settle like a lead weight at the back of his mind, or allow it to remind him of the past few hours of proof that he hadn’t bothered to ask nearly enough questions, and finds himself anxiously counting flickers of street lamps, badly calming the fretful skitter of something in his chest doing laps around his ribs.

He looks up when the car finally slows to a stop, after a little over twenty minutes of excruciating silence, to find them at a posh building he’s seen on one or two ads for hopeful politicians. He finds himself swallowing anxiously as he leaves the car, feeling hapless in his faded jeans and with a backpack over his shoulder; the sidelong look from the valet as Skywalker pulls away hardly helps soothe the sentiment.

“I don’t think we’ll be able to get a room,” Hux says, watching as patrons and employees in all manner of expensive dress shove past the pair of them. “My funds are… rather volatile at the moment.”

“We’ve already got one,” Ren says, speaking in a rather light turn to the awkward mood of the car, which is sign enough he’s _faking_ it; the fact he goes utterly quiet is another sure hint.

Hux endures a few steps more of silence, then lowers his voice, unamused. “And how?”

Ren turns his pack in his arms and reaches backward, pulling out Hux’s phone and turning it in his palm with a short flick of a thumb, then holding it out with a heavy sigh. “I put my print in it while you were asleep.”

Hux stares down at the phone, slowly taking it and wondering if he’s really so off-center to have never taken it back after he woke up, or if Ren simply managed to become some sort of pick-pocket at the hospital. He forces himself to forget it, narrowing an eye as he looks up, “I was under the impression you didn’t have money. Available.”

“One was good until August,” Ren says, grabbing now for his wallet to thumb out a card, shiny and black; he must have gotten it right before he went away – the 2017 is in perfectly legible silver. “See.”

“Ah,” Hux intones, peering at the card as he reaches up to rub at his brow with a pair of fingers. He may or may not have a nearly identical card in the depths of his own wallet, similarly pristine. It certainly would’ve been of some use to know the account wasn’t frozen – granted, he had also believed the Senator was out to get him.

He’s had far too much hindsight thrust upon him as of late.

“There was a lot of options. For rooms,” Ren says, seemingly unaware that prefacing himself with excuses is not a fantastic way to continue the evening. 

Hux manages to keep his reaction reduced to a narrow glance sideways, only to find Ren resistant to catching his eyes even for that instant. 

“Welcome!” The receptionist greets, a wide smile on their face as they look awkwardly over their high partition. “If I could just have the name you used for the reservation, please.”

“Ben Organa,” Ren says, affecting without warning that slight shade of Brahmin accent that makes him sound just insufferable. “Spelled like my mother.”

“Oh, your _mother_? You know I voted for – “ the receptionist stops mid-sentence, blinking widely and staring at their computer like it’s given them the codes to a bomb. They stay conspicuously silent for a good thirty seconds more, then paste on a wide, fake smile and look back up to Ren, reaching for their desk phone. “If you could let me give the manager a call and see if – uh, if it’s ready? Our bookings aren’t usually so short notice.”

“Whatever,” Ren says, affecting a short, put-upon twist at his mouth. “Your _website_ accepted it.”

“Yes, sir,” the receptionist agrees, nodding along with little more than custom; every ounce of their previous honest affability has vanished.

“That took less than a day,” Hux murmurs into Ren’s ear, reshouldering his bag and sure enough that he’s succeeding at masking his own satisfaction for how the receptionist is scrambling, dialing into their phone with hasty fingers. It’s just so _pleasing_ to see strangers jumping at his behest. “Must you always act like a little prince?”

Ren ignores the question with a short tilt of his head and crack of his neck, releasing a breath that carries the distinct echo of sullen objection underneath. He even leans forward onto reception when Hux tuts trying get him to look back over, choosing to steal one of the inscribed pens rather than give a response.

“Yes, fee paid in full. No – her son, actually,” the receptionist is mumbling into the phone, their hand just slightly over their mouth as they speak into the receiver, and clearly trying to keep their voice low and unobtrusive. “I don’t – Mark… Laura’s coming down for – _okay_. Thank you.”

“Your room will be ready in a few minutes, Mr Organa,” the receptionist says primly, placing the phone on the hook with a conspicuous white line of pressure around their mouth. “Our concierge will be down soon as possible. Thank you for choosing Boston Harbor.”

Hux sighs into the conspicuous space of Ren’s proceeding silence, taking a step back from the desk and nodding sideways himself to the tense receptionist. “Prompt, thank you.”

He winds through the lobby to sit at a bench seat facing the exit, dropping his bag to his side, and resists the impulse to lean in when Ren sits a little too close for public consumption. He instead reaches out and taps at the magazines on the table, pretending interest in real estate or Wall Street, rather than the swirling cloud of thought concerning how disappointed he is to be in a hotel again, even one this gilded.

He can only hope he doesn’t wake alone tomorrow, discovering this entire day has been some mad break in his psyche as a consequence of loneliness. He doesn’t think he could take it. Granted, it could qualify him to go live with the real Ren, which could be awkward if this breakdown was caused by Ren refusing to come home with him, but he thinks they’d make it through. It would be, in an odd way, a relief to end up like that, rather than suffering this ostensible reality involving mad science and the FBI.

“Excuse me, Mr. Organa?” A voice splits his thoughts, their words tense and directed straight at Ren, who barely glances up at them from his Us Weekly. He’s apparently fallen _completely_ into his spoiled brat persona, which is something of a little spot of normalcy. “My name is Laura; I’m the concierge.”

“The front desk said our room would be ready?” Hux interjects, clearing his throat and putting his magazine to the side.

“Yes, I’ve inspected it and found everything you requested to be in order,” Laura says, admirably transitioning from trying to get Ren’s attention to looking at Hux, pulling a pair of door cards from a front pocket; she offers them in a neat flush. “Your room number is 636; I can be found for anything you need by dialing number 7 on the phone.”

“Thank you,” Hux says, somehow keeping himself from turning to demand from Ren what the hell he’s decided to _request_.

“Have we already gotten your bags?” Laura asks, voice audibly straining, leaning forward on the balls of her feet and folding her hands together. She seems under the hopeful impression that they care about their stay here, rather than just as a place to sleep for the night.

“We’re fine to carry them,” Hux says, standing from the bench and relieved that she doesn’t insist on it; he doesn’t particularly want anything in his bag in the hands of underpaid hotel staff.

For all Hux would rather be anywhere else, the soft beep of a hotel door lock triggers some depressing Pavlovian response, an inward part of him recognizing with relief that he’s about to have walls between him and the irritants of the outside world. He doesn’t even mind when Ren practically falls over on him walking in, instead simply taking in the accouterments of the room and quickly catching on the most glaring additions to usual fare.

“I see,” Hux says, walking up to the tray of actual chocolate-covered strawberries, and rather large ones to be sure, next to a bottle of chilled champagne. He turns the ice bucket slightly, lining the handles up nicely parallel to the tray as he glances across the spade on the bottle label; it looks to be real. “Our _requests_ were in order.”

“Shut up,” Ren mutters, leaning into a couch with his elbow, gesturing weakly at the whole of the room. “The website had a lot of options.”

Hux raises a brow at the echo seemingly rising from the lobby, then reaches for a strawberry and lifts it to take a slow bite, watching Ren’s eyes dart down to his lips. He’s never quite understood how they could be an aphrodisiac, but, “I’ve never had these, you know.”

Ren looks back up to his eyes with a start, clearing his throat and setting his bag down at the side of the bed. He drifts in closer to Hux, taking a strawberry for himself with a peculiarly discerning expression. “I did, once. As a freshman. Got into an argument with someone about chemical properties of melting chocolate,” he takes a wary bite, but seemingly finds no issue as he covers his mouth awkwardly with the back of his hand and continues to speak even as he chews.“He uh… He brought strawberries the next class period.”

Hux tips his head, graciously swallowing a remark about etiquette and instead drawing out the pause with a soft hum. “I do believe he was flirting with you, Ren.”

“Maybe,” Ren says, curling forward with a shrug, then breaking the relative calm by exhaling a derisive scoff. He walks around the table of goodies and to the couch just in front of it, slumping backward with a low exhale. “ _Yeah_ , I know. It didn’t really last.”

Hux raises an eyebrow, feeling a smirk pull at the corner of his mouth. “Did he realize you were appalling?”

“I did better than him,” Ren says, his voice that flat, falsely apathetic tone of hidden pride. He looks backward to Hux with his head flat on a cushion, practically upside down. “Like, on exams. A lot. People don’t really like it when you ruin the curve.”

Hux tuts under his breath, fairly sure he’s successful in hiding his private satisfaction. He’s always bizarrely satisfied at stories of Ren shunting people to the side with successes, as long as they’re not directly overshadowing Hux’s own ambitions, which they more often, frustratingly, seemed to do. “And I’m sure you weren’t a twat about it at all.”

Ren tilts his head back and forth, a rather smug grimace threatening to break out across his expression.

“Worse?” Hux asks, hearing a disbelieving laugh from deep within his chest. He looks down again to the chilled champagne, then takes one of the glasses from the side and picks up the bottle.

“I might have told him it wasn’t his fault that he wasn’t as smart. Or something,” Ren says, running a hand through his hair with a low hum, brow quirking with the same moment a lopsided frown crosses his face. “I think I was joking?”

“I assume this was as a disgustingly young undergrad,” Hux says, pouring the champagne slowly into a flute; he should be able to get one in discretely before Ren starts in on the ‘fun facts’ about carbonation and ethanol.

“I guess – hey, shut up, you enrolled at _sixteen_ ,” Ren says, predictably curling his nose up when Hux gestures at him with the bottle, an offer more out of politeness than any thread of belief he’d be taken up on it. “I graduated high school and everything.”

“Yes, you’re _so_ normal,” Hux says, rolling his eyes and moving away from the champagne to sit on the sofa as well, shoving in probably a little closer than strictly friendly, but he thinks he can blame most of that on the softness of the cushions; he could, anyway, before he slid his unoccupied hand up Ren’s thigh. “Let me explain this retroactively, since you seem to be misunderstanding, despite your literal window into the mind. You were this giant, gawky teenager in an upper division class – “

“Gawky?” Ren repeats, his mouth straightening to a flat grimace.

“ – And this individual, likely well into their twenties, knew exactly who you were, so saw some value on trying to get into your nonexistent socialite circle,” Hux says, taking a slow sip of the champagne, disappointed to find it a bit dry for his taste. He’s also trying not to imagine any deeper this overconfident ass who might strive to manipulate a young, likely very vulnerable Organa, and maybe finding it slightly difficult not to insert himself. “But then you turned out to be not particularly seducible, and a bit of a cock, so he became more and more bitter, until … I’m guessing, ended up shouting at you in a hallway?”

Ren is quiet for a few moments, then clears his throat and reaches out over Hux’s shoulder for another strawberry; dark chocolate. “It was the quad.”

“My mistake,” Hux says, with a slow scoff, taking his hand from Ren’s leg and reaching forward for the last white chocolate in the box.

“You know,” Ren says, moving in with a slightly ungainly shift and settling even closer, long legs pressing from hip to ankle as if to make up for Hux retreating back. “I think those are working.”

“Working?” Hux repeats, blinking for a moment before fully realizing the look in Ren’s eyes, half-lidded and practically _beguiling_. “Ah.”

“Any effect on you?” Ren asks, clearly still trying to be subtle, for as much as he is like a brick.

Hux takes his time finishing off the strawberry in hand, watching Ren grow more and more eager for an answer, practically vibrating, and decides to spoil it a bit. “I don’t see a notebook.”

Ren actually has the gall to frown back. “What?”

“It’s just, usually, when you ask me that, I’m being used as a test subject,” Hux shrugs, gesturing with a loose turn of hand backward at his own chest, taking another sip of the champagne. “But you couldn’t have gotten to any of this before I did.”

“You make it sound so – ” Ren cuts himself off, pausing for a sullen moment and pressing his mouth into a line. “You’re a dick.”

“Do not pretend to have a high ground,” Hux says, reaching over to poke Ren hard in the sternum, then watching him pout like he’s being called out on nothing. “I know you must’ve toiled with aphrodisiacs.”

Ren is quiet for a few seconds, then actually shrugs in a most obvious confession. “They were all too much like meth; I’d never use any of them – not even on _me_.” 

“How admirable,” Hux exhales with a breathy huff, admittedly a little surprised.

Ren murmurs something petulant, curling his hand large around Hux’s knee and circling his thumb across the seam of the cap. “Hux.”

Hux hums low, dropping his hand to tap a short circuit across the knuckles of Ren’s audacious fingers. He takes another sip of the champagne. “I got you off just hours ago,”

Ren’s expression collapses with discontent and he practically whines, shoving sideways all in one go to bury his face in Hux’s shoulder. “We haven’t fucked for like _years_.”

“The neediness is not remotely hot,” Hux says, lying through his teeth and fairly certain it’s obvious even without telepathy. He doesn’t think he’s ever had someone beg him to – wait, no, he did once at a New Years party, but ended up refusing because… well, he had been a twat, and maybe a little too drunk to get proper hard, but he’ll never admit that last detail.

He’s actually fairly certain it was Ren in that instance as well, though not enough to bring it up; he really doesn’t feel like risking a jealousy element to this particular turn of mood.

“Whatever,” Ren mutters with a low laugh, pressing a pair of sloppy kisses into the hollow of Hux’s collarbone. “You get off on it so hard.”

“Do you even have lube?” Hux asks, sliding his own hand along Ren’s wrist and up his forearm, squeezing; he swings his other arm around and sets the flute onto a solid surface, feeling satisfied to not have _completely_ wasted his opportunity for overrated alcohol. “A condom?”

“Already got whatever you caught from French whores by sucking you earlier,” Ren says, his nose drifting markedly up near Hux’s ear, his breath hot. “No need for a _con_ - _dom_.”

Hux lets his eyes lower into a glare at the usual mocking of his accent, for all Ren can possibly see, but he hopes that it’s felt against the crown of dark hair just near his chin. “It’s not about the STIs.”

“Just like, fuck _me_ , then,” Ren says, leaning back and looking up to Hux with a pair of darkly beseeching eyes, a literal pout across his lips.

“Or that,” Hux says flatly, though it’s good of Ren to offer so early, before they can get to the usual awkward, in-the-moment decision. “As you well know.”

"Fine," Ren sighs, pushing up from the sofa with a put-upon groan. “I hate you."

Hux tilts his head and leans in just as Ren moves, pressing his lips into the sharp arch of a cheek. It’s indulgent and he feels ridiculous, definitely something he wouldn't have done two years ago, might not even have thought about, and the fact he's doing so now is a little... alarming. He'll admit it is worth it for the startled way Ren looks up and quickly away, the underside of his jaw turning a dusty burgundy. 

Ren mutters a few unintelligible words in further response as he finishes standing back up, shoulders hunching with apparent diffidence to contrast with overt irritation. He practically marches over to the tattered bag he’d grabbed just before the FBI had unofficially kidnapped them from their own home, starting to dig through whatever he’d deemed worthy of their new normal.

“What is that, then?” Hux says, leaning in against the couch arm with the flat of his elbow.

“Condoms, jackass,” Ren grumbles, haphazardly throwing a black bottle and a familiar box onto the surface of the bed’s pale coverlet.

Hux furrows his brow, standing from the sofa and walking over to see for himself. He peers down a few seconds, then reaches out and picks it up, running his thumb across the label. “When did you get this?”

Ren gives an odd grimace, tipping his head for a short moment as he bends down to pick up the condom box, practically fidgeting. “You were asleep a really long time.”

“So you left?” Hux says, horrified to hear his own voice pitch dangerously close to a creak. The split second thought of waking in their apartment, in Ren’s old room, and alone, is startlingly awful.

A strange silence settles across the room, until Ren takes a sharp breath and scratches a hand through his hair, dragging his fingers back down his face in clear attempt to hide his expression. “I – yeah.”

Hux finds himself at an awkward place; he wants to say more, to scold, but about what? He didn’t notice Ren was gone, nor is there any sensible reason to think of it as the present danger his brain keeps trying to make it. He clears his throat in discomfort, turning the bottle in his hand with a tap of his thumb. It’s looks to be tropical-scented, which sounds only mildly horrendous. “Didn’t have the usual?”

“No,” Ren answers, a little to quick, then pausing, until he sighs heavily and tosses the box a few times in his hand, tapping anxiously at the side. “Maybe. I don’t – I kind of… I just took the first thing I saw.”

Hux blankly ruminates for a few moments on what that could even mean, then feels the worst, most likely assumption descend with a start. “Took? Did you _steal_ this?”

Ren shrugs forward in a fairly worrying manner, body hunching inward.

“Oh, good lord,” Hux says, the mortified tension finally fading from his shoulders to be replaced by a more comfortable schadenfreude – at least, until he remembers he’s legally associated to this, allegedly cheap, sexual maniac. He hopes whatever cameras that caught him were just for show.

“Let’s blame the other guy,” Ren decides, after another few wordless moments. He starts moving forward, kneeing onto the bed and practically crawling toward Hux, throwing his shirt off in a familiar roll of his shoulders.  

“I don’t reward bad behavior,” Hux says flatly, ignoring how the heat settling behind his ears betrays a very different sentiment.

“I showered; I got the condoms,” Ren says, reaching forward and pulling Hux into his chest by the shoulders, evidently trying to distract by being handsy and shirtless. “And I didn’t even want them.”

“Stole,” Hux reminds shortly, leisurely spreading his own hands across the soft, warm skin of Ren’s waist, quickly pushing away a depressing thought about all that wasted time in the hospital; Ren is back, he’s got more than enough time to get back obsessed with gains or whatever, or find a new, less sweaty hobby.

“It wasn’t _me_ ,” Ren says, pulling at the hem of Hux’s shirt from the back, his palms hot at the base of Hux’s spine. “It was Kyle.”

“Kylo,” Hux corrects, letting himself be dragged into the bed and onto Ren’s lap, grinding down as his scruples wears thin. 

Ren exhales in exaggerated surprise when Hux pushes at his shoulders, throwing his arms dramatically across the pillows in easy acquiescence and pitching his hips up seemingly just to make clear that his cock is already a hard line in his jeans. The affected whimper is just another lewd layer, tongue peaking out between plush lips as he looks back up through dark lashes.

“You terrible man,” Hux says, rubbing the knuckles of one hand along the long line of Ren’s neck, pressing down by almost intolerable measures into Ren’s crotch; he starts single-handedly working on the buttons at his fly just to punctuate his next statement. “Renting this posh room just to get fucked.”

Ren lifts his chin as if to encourage the stroking down his throat, giving a little, animalistic groan in response that is just insufferable.

Hux manages to get his own cock free before leaning back and easily doing the same to Ren, glancing down to watch in little more than indulgence as he ruts forward and presses them together for a few pointed seconds of grinding. He can’t help but regret that he’s still almost completely clothed save his open fly; it makes it all feel somehow fleeting, as much as he knows that’s just his mind working against him.

The hotel is lovely, the champagne decent, the circumstances dismal, but he wishes they could be at home. Either of them. Maine would have been ideal, new beginnings and all that, but they were _literally_ back home – that clone bastard couldn’t have stayed at whatever bullshit excuse he was using for another day?

Hux shakes his head and pulls his shirt off as he shoves the thoughts aside, sliding down the mattress to get closer again to Ren. He does panic for a moment when the lube is twice as far away as expected, but thinks he covers it fairly well with a pat and squeeze down the inside of a thigh.

He starts tugging on Ren’s jeans when he gets everything close and in order, maybe a little too eagerly by the low, uncalled-for chuckle he hears from near the headboard. He feels his jaw tic, but otherwise ignores it for now, preferring to concentrate on the slow reveal of skin beneath his hands. He’s been thinking about this with some buried part of himself every day for years, and the idea of paying attention to anything else is borderline upsetting.

Hux strokes up and down the bare skin of Ren’s thighs once they’re free to part around his shoulders, sliding his hand up around that thick cock for quick tease before drifting lower in mild disbelief. “You _shaved_?” He murmurs, drawing his thumb down the line of Ren’s balls to the smooth skin around his asshole, tracing with a sudden dryness at the back of his throat. “Presumptuous.”

“Shut up,” Ren mutters, plainly moving into the touch with a groaning breath, a half-shake of his head. “Not for you.”

“I’d disagree,” Hux says, leaning down and very, very carefully licking a flat line across the taut skin on the underside of Ren’s hard cock, glancing up just as he parts the tip of his tongue from the prominent ridge. “It’s clearly been done today.”

Ren murmurs something perilously close to a moan as he unsubtly tilts his hips up, chasing, “Didn’t notice before.”

“I was busy,” Hux says, reaching for the lube again and toying with the tab, watching through his lashes for a few seconds as Ren gets visibly more wound up at just the sound of clicking plastic. He takes pity when Ren curls up a hand near his chest, and shifts forward to tease gently at the cockhead bobbing right near his mouth with a few more heavy licks around the head but not quite over.

Ren mutters something unintelligible and definitely rude under a gasp, then groans an even harsher breath; a hand ghosts across the crown of Hux’s head, but he apparently remembers well enough not to pull. “Teasing fuck.”

Hux hums low and long in response, feeling the sensation as it meets the cockhead over his tongue, and enjoys the way Ren’s thighs tense under his hands in desperate restraint when he finally takes him entire between his lips. He finds himself absently thrusting down against the mattress in some empathic response after only another minute getting Ren hot, feeling the excitement catch up to him quicker than has any right. He eventually forces himself out of distraction, keeping one hand moving slow up and around Ren’s cock as he uses the other to slowly breach into tight muscle with a lube-slicked finger, idly rubbing at soft-shaven skin with his thumb.  

He pulls off after a few moments of easing said finger in and out, licking up under the side of Ren’s cock and down to seam of a thigh just as he adds another, curling them teasingly just to watch Ren jerk in response. He’s still the same as ever, breath turning almost entirely into little whimpering gasps by the time Hux has worked three fingers and an alarming amount of the fruity lube into his ass and across his thighs, getting messy if just for the sake of it with his rolling hips and the way he curls in around Hux’s hand at even the sparest hint of pressure on his prostate.

It never fails to make Hux feel like he’s doing something impeccably spot-on; it always has, even at their worst, and he’d sort of been worried that it wouldn’t now, for all most of that anxiety has been assuaged. Sex can be so tricky, even with Ren, despite it being outright easier to manage than most other aspects of their relationship.

“Off,” Ren mutters, his voice a hoarse break between pants.

Hux glances up with a start, lifting a brow and almost wondering if that was Ren deciding he’d had enough for the night. Or forever. He doesn’t think Ren had been reading his mind…

“Fucking pants,” Ren groans, kicking at Hux’s hip with his foot, curling inward almost comically as his ass thrusts backward onto Hux’s hand. “Get them off. You’re not – not _going_ anywhere.”

Hux toys with the idea of disagreeing with the stroppy tone, but ends up lazily giving a scolding nip at the soft skin of Ren’s inner thigh. He reluctantly slows the shift of his fingers before pulling out completely, slinking down to the end of the bed and onto shaky feet.

“Wait,” Ren whines, outright reaching forward as Hux moves back, a dissatisfied snarl twisting at his mouth. “I was close.”

“You bloody were not,” Hux scoffs, wiping his hand on the edge of the bed and shucking his jeans down his legs, feeling gawky as he nearly trips out of them in his haste to fall back in the crux of Ren’s thighs.

He manages to slide an easy hand up the soft spread of Ren’s stomach as he bends back over, leaning down to mouth at Ren’s collarbones with little more than indulgent want compelling his every action. A pair of large hands slip up across Hux’s hips as Ren ruts upward, a thigh wrapping round the back of Hux’s leg in the same moment, slick with lube and sweat as they slide up against each other for a spare few moments.

“If you let go, I’ll fuck you,” Hux says, dragging his teeth down the line of Ren’s jaw, trying not to get lost in the quickly-found rhythm – it would be _such_ a waste.

“You started it,” Ren responds, exhaling a stuttering breath just next to Hux’s ear, but his hands slide up Hux’s waist and around to his chest, gently pushing in wordless agreement.

Hux blinks in surprise when he shifts up and back to find Ren already fumbling with the condom box, and can’t help but wonder if he’s about to watch some ludicrous attempt at sabotage. He’s even got half a mind to let it happen in this state.

“I got it,” Ren mumbles, looking up with a flicker of lashes before pulling a packet from the box, now laughably missing a corner, and tearing into it further with a short twist of his fingers. “Back up.”

Hux exhales a huff but leans up on his knees obligingly, shuddering some as Ren slowly slides the condom on with careful fingers and a small furrow between his brows, resistant to finding the mundane act any sort of arousing. It’s difficult to do when Ren finishes the job by taking opportunity to jack him a few times with a rude little smirk growing at the corner of his mouth.

Hux reaches for the bottle once Ren lays back, hastily slicking up with an uncooperative hand, though he’s fairly certain Ren is far enough in that he won’t noticed the clumsiness in all his usual sweaty, chest-heaving posturing. Hux hasn’t fucked anyone in over two years, and the fact is becoming rather distressing as the involuntary dry-spell soon comes to a close; the only consolation is Ren is in the same position, but doesn’t seem to care a bit.

It almost feels like the first time, and somehow also the opposite, as Hux confirms Ren is ready with a gentle thrust of his fingers. All said though, it’s the impatient little noises that really force the flush across Hux’s face as he lines up the head of his cock, glancing up just as he makes that first breach to find Ren staring back with half-lidded eyes, then gets encouraged further by persuasive fingers wrapping around the wrist where he’s using Ren’s hip for balance.

He firmly takes Ren’s cock back in his other hand as he sinks in, stroking intermittently in time with short, slow thrusts, easing his way in and refusing to ruin this with over-excitement. It’s improbably easy to find that familiar pace, subconsciously knowing where to angle his hips and when to start moving quicker, or even the perfect time to slow practically to a crawl that makes it that much better.

Ren groans like he’s suffering, turning his head and exposing the long line of his neck, throat pulsing with frantic swallows. 

“What was that?” Hux murmurs, hearing his words slur, snapping his hips just to watch Ren roll up into the thrust. He shifts a few degrees over the next quick few, looking and listening to Ren lose the struggle for composure; he can’t come just from this, not like Hux, but he can certainly get so wound up he might outright cry.

Ren turns his hand from Hux’s arm to the back of his thigh, clearly to urge the pace quicker, then dares to clumsily attempt and sneak the other in to get at his cock, bobbing flushed and unmistakable between them. 

“No,” Hux scolds, hearing his voice as little more than a growl as he releases his grip from Ren’s hips to grab at wandering hands, falling forward so that Ren arms are now pinned above his head. He reluctantly slows and draws out his next thrust, just for the secondary pleasure of watching Ren react. “Naughty boy, have you forgotten?”

Ren erratically shakes his head, tucking in his tailbone and arching up against the pressure as Hux resumes pace. He starts panting after a few moments, brow furrowing and uttering unintelligible, angry nonsense, but never quite exercising an attempt to free his arms.

Hux hums and turns into Ren’s neck, mouthing greedily over sweat-damp skin. He bites down, sucking hard along the swell of a tendon, and listens to a satisfyingly sharp whimpers just above his ear. It’s not exactly the most insufferable thing in the world, feeling Ren’s pulse beneath his tongue; it's easy to get lost in, dedicating more focus to an indulgence he had little time for just hours ago. 

“You’re such a dick,” Ren whines eventually, shoving his cheek up against Hux’s head, practically nuzzling for all he’s petulant. “You said – said you – but still fucking _torturing_ me…”

Hux can’t help but chuckle into the skin under his teeth, not bothering to suppress the smirk as he shoves up and looks down at Ren, feeling sweat, sticky and hot, pool between their bodies. It’s like he hasn’t felt this alive in his entire life, and he glances down across Ren’s taut, bruising neck, his heaving chest, and finally fixing on his fat, leaking cock, twitching with every inward thrust. It’s the most unbelievably amazing thing he’s seen today, which is saying something.

He lets go of Ren’s arms, teasing his fingers down around a nipple, his belly button, and thrusts up hard just as he wraps a hand around that lovely cock. His other hand finds slick purchase on a desperately lifting thigh, helping angle Ren’s legs wide and sink in deeper.

“Oh fuck,” Ren groans, thrusting up heavy and hot in palm, cockhead jerking and leaking against Hux’s thumb with every pull. His arms curl up around his head, forearms crossing now over his eyes like some defense against his own pleasure, just as he’s done every time Hux has fucked him in this position, muffling all those enticing little noises.

Hux furrows his brow and realizes that, as if it’s for the first time, he can’t see any part of Ren’s face for this, which is suddenly more an issue than it ever was in the past. He holds close those memories of hitched, choking breaths, but wants so much more to see them happen – to _feel_ them.

He drops Ren’s leg and leans down at a stretch, breathlessly pushing away the surprisingly lax arms from Ren’s face, quickening his hand and his hips with some lust clouding his mind, but also to watch that expression twist into knots. Ren is biting desperately at his lips, bruised and glossy with spit, and Hux finds himself dropping down, gladly tasting every moan and whimper as one of Ren’s arms curls around his shoulders; Hux has done this, made his lovely boy squirm, and he’s having it in every indulgent way possible.

The moment Ren comes is altered in more ways than the visual, most notably by a heady rush of foreign pleasure abruptly flooding over Hux’s mind like from a broken dam; familiarly cool, yet tinged now with unrestrained lust. He finds himself rutting forward in abandoned shock and coming with a sudden, almost painful intensity in a handful of stilted thrusts, hearing himself groan and pant into Ren’s answering mouth as the sensation echoes off impossible corners of his mind.

He eventually shoves himself off Ren’s heaving chest with an exhausted groan, realizing it had to have been minutes later by the chill setting in across his skin. He stares at the ceiling in absent befuddlement, twisting a hand into his own hair; what the high hell had that been? He’s never _felt_ Ren come, aside for physically – it had been normal just earlier.

Hux looks to his side and reaches out with an absent hum, as if he might find something, only to instead slide his fingers clumsily up to grasp Ren by the chin, pressing his head up to see the line of that jaw stark against flushed neck, the contour of a swollen mouth still parted in heavy breath. “Look at you.”

“What?” Ren mumbles, peeking and catching Hux from the corner of his eye.

Hux huffs and shifts his thumb, brushing up against Ren’s dark, damp lashes. “You’re actually kind of pretty.”

Ren goes stone-still for a moment, then actually pulls away from Hux and rolls onto his front, shoving his face into a pillow with an unintelligible grumble. He’s clearly heard the remark with twice the sarcasm and none of the sincerity.

Hux grimaces as he pulls his hand back, ignoring the widening hollow in his chest and hoping somehow this is forgotten in the morning, as well as whatever bad sentiment was taken from it. He slowly turns to look toward the bathroom, shoving himself up with a groan and sneering in disgust as he pulls the condom from his softened cock. He can feel the sweat on his skin tightening as it dries, and nearly kills himself across forgotten clothes on the way to the shower in bid to rinse _everything_ off.

He closes the door quieter than he usually might, a feeling like a darkening bruise at some untouchable center of his chest. The bath provides distraction by being curiously intimidating, with multiple shower heads that give absolutely zero warning before initializing all at once as the knob is turned, making him feel foolish when he starts back in surprise and knocks his thigh on the counter.

His mind drifts as he rinses off, staring down at pristine bath tile and wondering why Ren chose here, then getting frustrated knowing he could have gotten them bloody chocolate strawberries from a corner shop and settled in a lovely Super 8 far outside the area, and with no risk of a likely nutter with high intelligence tracking either of them. Granted, he has no idea how alike this mercenary might _think_ to him… Ren devising their destination may have actually helped to keep them under radar.

The thought is both comforting and disturbing.

He steps out of the glass cubicle and finds himself glad the mirror is too opaque to see as he reaches for a towel. He doesn’t particularly want to see – 

“Oh hell,” Hux says, inhaling in shock at the sight of Ren in the darkened doorway, hunched over forward in a distinctly zombie-like fashion. He looks hastily away and slowly finishes toweling off his hair, feeling an uncomfortable beat of embarrassment flush across the back of his neck. “I thought you were asleep.”

Ren shoves further in to the small room, glancing down Hux’s front with a certain unhappy glint in his eyes; he’s definitely still stewing on the remark. “I’m supposed to get first shower.”

“You didn’t even get up,” Hux says, looking around for a comb that’s definitely still in his bag and hoping desperately that he’s not coming off as evasive. He’d actually completely forgotten that particular call for rights of first shower, as much as it was his own excuses of slickness in awkward places that had started it.

“Whatever,” Ren mutters, his tone quietly sullen, almost brooding, which is far worse than anger at this particular moment.

Hux stares at the sink, then swallows and turns around before he can think better of it, sliding his hand along Ren’s bare sternum and leaning in toward his ear. The muscle under his hand is tense, and he tries not to feel hurt by it. “I wasn’t mocking you,” he says, just barely able to see Ren’s lashes flicker backward from the corner of his eye, and presses a hasty kiss against the pivot of his jaw. “You’re too big to be so delicate.”

Ren is otherwise unresponsive for a moment longer, until an arm circles around Hux’s back, then the other, and it takes a few moments to realize this is some deliberate trap rather than sentimentality. He won’t move back even when pinched at the sensitive skin along the peak of his hip.

“ _Ren_ ,” Hux says sharply, trying to extract himself with a short turn that, despite not being as forceful as it should be, would normally be able to get him out. His skin starts to prickle with mortified heat, which is another layer of embarrassment to this ludicrous situation. “Let me go.”

“No,” Ren says, his chin hooking more firm over Hux’s shoulder, leaning in from the side. “I’m testing something.”

Hux exhales a long breath, feeling his shoulders eventually loosen as the heat slowly circulates away from the surface of his skin. The hold is troublesome enough, but isn’t Ren uncomfortable? He should be squirming for a shower with all that lube on the back of his thighs; the subtle, fruity smell of it just barely perceptible in the small room.

“Shorter than I expected,” Ren says, both hands drifting lower than strictly friendly – clearly, he’s gotten over… whatever it was. “Barely a minute.”

Hux rolls his eyes, glancing to the side and finding the fuzzy shapes of them reflecting in the cooling mirror. He glares at it hard, trying not to draw the obvious comparison, if slightly thankful they’ve returned to some sort of equilibrium – at least, what they’ve become the past… Day? It feels like months.

“For you to unwind,” Ren explains, humming under his breath and sounding far too judgmental for a naked man. “You’re just really bad at this.”

“Flattering,” Hux says flatly, carefully ignoring the palm flexing around his bare ass, blatantly hinting toward a second round that they really don’t have time for tonight. “It would’ve taken less if you weren’t covered in a pungent layer of ick.”

Ren gives a low hum under his breath, leaning back and looking over Hux’s front, as if there might be something to peer at under his skin. “So, did you not take the showers as some…” He pauses for a moment, mouth twisting into shapes, “Reason to avoid me after sex?”

“ _No_ ,” Hux says, hearing his voice pitch into an embarrassingly high note.

Ren stares at him for a few moments longer, until his eyes abruptly narrow. “Weird. You’re weird.”

“Because I enjoy being clean?” Hux asks, raising his brows with mildly exaggerated disbelief.

Ren exhales a sigh, his mouth curling into a lopsided frown, then shrugs forward to nudge into Hux. “I mean... Do you think sex is gross?”

“If I said yes,” Hux asks flatly, lifting a hand and pressing again at the center of Ren’s chest, if now to tip him back on his heels. “Would you shower?”

“What if I didn’t?” Ren says, his tone turning soft and some laughable attempt at sultry. “Since I can tell you’re lying.”

Hux narrows his eyes, speaking equally hushed just to keep his own voice determinedly neutral. “Then I would just have to put up with it, wouldn’t I?”

“Ugh,” Ren groans, reaching out without looking and sliding open the shower door with a dangerous clang of glass.  

“Good boy,” Hux says, tapping him mockingly on the ass as he sidesteps him out into the room.

“I fucking hate you, why can’t you – ” then the water turns on, and whatever else Ren might’ve been complaining about is stifled by disbelieving scoffs and a yelped, _“Oh shit!”_

~

“We’re meeting with the FBI in an _hour,_ ” Ren says, turning and leaning into the mirror just next to the bed, as if to confirm what he’s seen in the bathroom. He cranes his head sideways, pressing fingers along the wine-red marks that stain his neck. “I’m never going to be able to hide this.”

“So tragic,” Hux says, each syllable utterly insincere.   

“The fact you always did this made no fucking sense to me, you know?” Ren snaps, tugging his shirt over his head, then grimacing again at his reflection when the low v-neck hides little more than a portion of one of them. “Not into kissing, but a couple giant, _embarrassing_ hickeys is totally cool.”

“I hadn’t thought about it,” Hux confesses, feeling somewhat blindsided by the strength of Ren’s tone. He’s never heard any complaint about it before now, and isn’t too proud to admit it twists something painful at the center of his chest. “I used to do that instead of kissing you,”

The sheer number of emotions that cross Ren’s over-expressive face would probably kill a lesser man, but in the end he just gives another groan, curling his palm around the marks as if that might hide them from prying eyes. He gives a long sigh after another few moments, looking up into the mirror with a frown across his mouth and directing it straight at Hux.

“I’ll repress the urge in the future,” Hux says stiffly, attempting to be more glib about it, but feeling his molars grind when he closes his mouth. He’d known even when they started that it was possessive, enjoyed the sight of Ren with a couple marks around his neck too much for his own good, or his own self-delusion, which seems to have carried further with this other one.

“No, I just…” Ren takes a deep breath, straightening and turning to look without the mirror between them. “It’s not that – that’s not what I meant, _fuck_. It’s that you never cared about the – ” He gestures at his own neck, half-pointing and seemingly spinning in disbelief. “The gossip. That it wasn’t you.”

Hux is quiet for a moment, trying to think of a sensible response; the habit does contradict sharply with how he’d handled things between them. He takes a shallow breath, shrugging tightly, “I cared more how I felt seeing them.”

Ren looks taken aback as his hand goes to his neck again, tracing out the marks with markedly more cautious fingers. “Oh.”

“Do you?” Hux asks, feeling emotion pinch downward at the corner of his mouth. “Care, that is.”

“No,” Ren scoffs with obvious defensive mood, a subtle flush crossing the bridge of his nose; he runs both hands through his hair, mussing it into his face as if to hide himself. “I mean. I _care_ that Rey’s partner is going to make fun of me.”

Hux hides an untimely smirk with a glance down, looking back to his wallet and shoving it in his pocket. He slowly hunches near his pack in the next moment, peeking up to confirm Ren is still messing about with clothes, then he transfers a red pack from the bag to another pocket, feeling that desperate itch at the back of his mind throb and knowing he won’t get a chance for likely the rest of the day. Or _ever_ , good lord. “I’m going to get some coffee,” he says, rising and going quickly for the door with a childish feeling of haste at the back of his mind. “I’ll meet you in the lobby.”

“Bull _shit_ ,” Ren calls out, just as the door shuts with a gentle thunk.

Hux gives an uncomfortable nod to a passing cleaner, pressing the down button on the elevator and tugging the crushed pack from his front pocket. He doesn’t even care that most of the cigarettes left are broken stubs, he just needs something to tide him over, and somehow engaging in this usual dance of pretending Ren doesn’t know he fell off the wagon again is oddly comforting. He’ll probably quit again soon enough, as one can only handle so many reminders about toxic chemicals and cell mutation, but that day isn’t today.

The first inhale is some ironic breath of fresh air, calming the skittering in the corners of his mind and pairing nicely with the gentle lull of the harbor in front of him. It compels him to recall that first impression of the house, imagining someplace quiet to have a sit down and try not to think about all the shit he’s done wrong in the past years. He idly wishes that he’d asked Ren to come down with him, but the slow exhale of smoke in front of his face is reason enough to forget that futile longing.

He tilts his head at the sound of footsteps behind him, toying with the idea of dropping his cigarette before getting scolded by posh hotel management, but instead lifts his hand up to take another drag. He thinks he has it in him to scare off some spotty-faced student with –

“What’s this?” A far too familiar voice greets, punctuated by a pair of tuts when Hux tries to reach around and shove him away.

Armitage does shift back a few steps, gesturing with some odd looking object in his hand, about the length of a soda can and half the width, bearing underneath the unmistakable shape of a trigger. He’s got a lopsided smirk on his face, somehow coming off as utterly repulsive. “I’m curious, does your dearest know of this nasty habit?”

“He’s a smart man,” Hux responds slowly, tensely flicking ash onto the ground between them, trying not to look at the… gun, or whatever else it might be. He’s having a hard time looking anywhere right now, actually, as the uncanny discomfort is far worse than with Kylo, speaking to his own face ten times worse than speaking to another Ren.

“Kylo liked to go on about how they’d kill me,” Armitage says, ostensibly careless of the circumstances as he goes on to make actual conversation, his gaze noticeably fixed on the cigarette for a moment before he gives a lazy tilt of his head to catch Hux’s eyes. “As if that would matter.”

Hux feels the impulse to point out that it likely meant Kylo cared if he dropped dead, but holds quiet until the notion passes, remembering Ren’s story and recognizing Armitage probably doesn’t care about that either. He probably just heard it as some bothersome co-worker trying to meddle in his personal choices, and Hux may admittedly know that feeling from experience.

“Why does he go by that?” Hux asks, once the silence has become strained beyond tolerability, for all it might be one-sided – his survival instincts rearing into a chattering sort of anxiety. “Kylo. It’s not particularly intuitive.”

Armitage seems to come up short, peering a few moments before taking a long inhale with what is recognizably honest curiosity. “Why does yours go by _Ren_?”

Hux forces a shrug with a single shoulder and lifts the cigarette for a drag, nervously brushing a thumb across his mouth. He’s actually a little irritated not to have gotten a real answer. “Some childhood mishap with his father’s godawful handwriting.”

Armitage is quiet for a few moments, then gives a short hum and a sideways nod.

Hux hopes that’s not what he always looks like when he’s acquiescent – it doesn’t look like agreement at all. He takes another anxious drag before dropping the stub to the ground, stamping the ember out with his heel and glancing shortly behind him to damnably empty boardwalk. He longs to be far less a coward. Or had remembered the gun quite literally sitting upstairs in his bag.

“Magnanimous, aren’t I?” Armitage says, his mouth curling into a snide smile just as he raises his weapon in a blink.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “That doesn’t matter now,” Armitage says, dodging the question, slowing to a stop and crouching down again, grabbing Hux’s fingers over the oar in an eerie grip to twist the noisy ring off with a single, indescribably cruel turn of his hand. “I have my regrets, but I won’t wallow in them. I’m nothing like you.”

Hux lifts his head with a start to glaring sunlight and the smell of salt and mildew; the particularly jarring sensation of his arms half-numb from being wrenched up above his head and tied by the wrists with what feels like razor wire. A fraught glance around puts him firmly in some sort of garage, cluttered with mechanical equipment and a single dry-docked boat that he’s cable-tied to by an _oar_ at its side. He tries to shift, move the oar to the side and out, only to grimace again when he looks left to see it wedged in tight by an inconvenient shelving unit.

His captor appears a few moments later, squeezing in through the tight door with a sidestep and now absent a blazer, shirtfront exposed to show off a ludicrous pair of suspenders. Hux can’t help but wonder now if this other universe is also stuck in the 1950s, or if they’ve invented cross-dimensional travel, but not something so forward-thinking as a _belt_ \- he refuses to accept he’d ever wear suspenders otherwise.

“How was that, then?”  Armitage asks, crouching down and settling back on his heels as the door clicks closed heavily behind him.

Hux narrows his eyes, glancing up from various sartorial offenses to reluctantly look Armitage in the face. He still looks so perfectly put together, infuriatingly conceited, and Hux could do without this continuing slight against his current appearance. He hasn’t shaved in days, his hair hasn’t been waxed in _months_ , so of course this twat crosses impossible barriers to tie him up and sneer at him.

“The stunner,” Armitage clarifies needlessly, lightly tapping at the holster on his hip with a pair of fingers. “I’ve never been hit by it.”

Hux feels a snarl curl at his lips, though he must admit the method of his capture is least of his complaints. “No suffered side effects.”

“Shame,” Armitage mutters, voice going absent mid-word as his eyes suddenly dart to a window. He leans forward to brush aside the blinds, only to shift back with a disgruntled frown, looking back down to Hux. “Not even a mild one?”

“Nothing,” Hux says flatly, only to realize with a twinge that might be taken as some invitation.

Armitage seems to think the same, going silent for a long few seconds of intense staring, until he appears to think better of it, glancing again to the blinded window. “Our similarity is rather convenient,” he says, rising on his feet and proceeding to step along the slatted boards of the floor, shined shoes clicking with every step. “A fellow by the docks outside saw you being dragged along, but I simply told him you were my addict brother.”

Hux looks across the thin shoulders of Armitage, down to his shirtsleeves pulled to the elbow, and sees no different figure to himself. He realizes there must be someone else, some kind of accomplice, but only sees more shelves of equipment. “I’m surprised you even managed it.”

“Oh, I didn’t,” Armitage says, turning around with a short smirk as the only vague addition to his arrogance.

Hux narrows his eyes at the ensuing silence, wary as it begins to settle heavy, only to feel a sort of ludicrous fury overcome him when Armitage reaches backward toward an apparent pocket, starting to tap a familiar red pack against his leg. He ends up taking one out with his teeth as he reaches now for a presumed lighter, stashing away the pack again in a quick move.

“You know what I liked best about Kylo?” Armitage says, lighting his stolen cigarette with a red and black zippo that Hux has never seen, let alone carried – the cheap plastic, complimentary one is apparently not good enough. “His unpredictability. He looked nothing like the most dangerous man you’d ever meet.”

Hux watches Armitage pace around the small boathouse, trying to time the turns away with unsuccessfully shoving up more comfortably against the hull of the boat to loosen the discomfort of his back. He doesn’t think he’s going to die just yet, unless Armitage has projected torture in mind. “You speak like he’s dead.”

“I thought he was,” Armitage says, taking a long drag and exhaling slowly, smoke pluming into the air. “I’m slow adjusting – from what I’ve read, you’re rather the same.”

Hux does his best not to crack his teeth gritting them, cross at the blatant taunting, not to mention how it folds into this show at indifference that can be seen through like tissue paper. He’s now going to think about it every time he tries to act kept together, most notably right at this moment. “He thinks you’re here to kill him.”

“That isn’t…” Armitage shakes his head, tapping ash onto the ground just next to Hux’s foot as he makes another pass. “Neutralize is a better word, really. He’s on an unsanctioned assignment.”

Hux narrows his eyes into a frustrated glare, feeling his jaw start to tic sympathetically to the fidgeting Armitage has been at since he walked in – pacing, clenching hands, sending paranoid glances into dark corners. Hux is grudgingly starting to realize from the outside that Ren may have gotten the ring as more than just a joke. His own fretfulness is almost more unsettling to witness than to feel, and he doesn’t have the luxury to smoke.

“Now, you’ll just sit there,” Armitage says, gesturing downward in a ludicrous drop of his hands, carelessly dropping more ash to the ground. “And wait until I do that, because I’ve got a couple variables depending on it.”

“He’s not going to have any concern with looking for me,” Hux says, feeling slightly desperate, suddenly remembering a few worries that feel like lifetimes ago – he wonders if Armitage could really be that resourceful. “He’s run.”

“You moron, my mission specified only to – ” Armitage shakes his head again, a manic smile breaking across his face, uncanny and showing his teeth like bestial snarl. He stops in front of Hux, ostensibly just to sneer, “The dossier says Ben Organa. It didn’t specify what one.”

Hux feels his eyes widen, a cataclysm of fury bursting behind his sternum, but manages to keep his mouth shut; he’s fairly sure they’re alike enough that reticence will be more infuriating than any sort of snide response. He can’t even call Armitage a monster or say he’s egotistical, as it would be too hypocritical even for him – he’d do the same if it came down to it. If he had been there that night and seen two versions of Ren, knowing one of them was about to be accused of murder, he’d have thrown the other under the bus and supported the death penalty if it could’ve kept Ren outside.

“I meant to do it right away, so apologies for the cock-up,” Armitage says, lifting the stub to his mouth for some last attempt at nicotine. “Had a bit of a panic when the first thing I saw was you all in that fucking booth. Practically _cuddling_. Like bloody teenagers.”

“So you stole my car?” Hux had some idea of it before, but now he knows for certain: the other Armitage Hux is an absolute moron. He glances up to his hands again, twisting his wrists to no avail; he doesn’t think there’s even any way to break the cable tie at this angle.

A _lucky_ moron.

“It was a tragic coincidence, I assure you,” Armitage continues, starting to pace again, but at least his hands are empty on the next go-around, no longer flaunting his freedom. “That restaurant doesn’t exist where I’m from – the location is a shell corporation’s campus. Not to mention the dossier said he was in hospital.”

“I don’t see how it should have even mattered,” Hux says, following Armitage under his lashes and feeling such disdain that he can’t help the twisting frown across his mouth. “I’ve heard enough to know you weren’t even _with_ the man, let alone might care where he was or with who – Dopheld, really? I must admit he would be easier to control.”

“You don’t know anything!” Armitage snaps, voice rising abruptly and going borderline shrill, though he continues to walk and gesture widely at little more than the boat; his other hand curls tight into a fist at his side, knuckles blanching with pressure as it swings at his side. “With your posh education and your – _your_ husband. Your _happiness_. I do as I’m ordered. I don’t get to dissent for reasons so futile as my personal feelings. I’m ecstatic you’ve got a taste of it.”

Hux watches the pacing continue for a few tense seconds, feeling the twitch at his jaw spread up into his cheek as he tries to understand what any of that could even mean; he feels himself trying to spin the ring like some herald of thought, uncomfortable with the angle. “You were made to go for Mitaka,” he realizes, ignoring the nuclear strength of his second-hand embarrassment, some by Ren’s erroneous assumption, but mostly for the spotty, uneven flush across Armitage’s face and neck – he looks appallingly ugly. “By who _– why_?”

“That doesn’t matter now,” Armitage says, dodging the question, slowing to a stop and crouching down again, grabbing Hux’s fingers over the oar in an eerie grip to twist the noisy ring off with a single, indescribably cruel turn of his hand. “I have my regrets, but I won’t wallow in them. I’m nothing like you.”

“What do you think you’ll be doing with that?” Hux snarls, forgetting to hold his tongue or his dignity, knowing he’s making himself look weak. The loss of the ring’s weight has left room for little more than a flood of anxiety; he’s had it through _everything_ – doctoral assessments, classes, court trials, illicit sales, arrests, and reconciliation. He finds himself physically kicking out, trying to trip up this actual evil twin that’s stolen his wedding ring like some sort of storybook villain. “Give it back!”

“Oh, I don’t think so. You know what I’ve decided to do before I take him out, just to clear the air?” Armitage says, leaning back on his heels and slowly turning the ring, tilting his head back to Hux after a few moments of watching the gears. “I’m going to break his heart. You just can’t seem to get around to it proper.”

Hux feels his eyes widen, breath going shallow in his chest. He knows that Ren will recognize an imposter, because he has to – this man is just as much not him as Kylo wasn’t Ren, but…

What if he _doesn’t_?

Hux ends up staring back at Armitage, managing to recapture his silent aplomb and lift his chin just slightly; he can almost convince himself this is one of his various miserable dreams, if with far more literal self-reflection than usual. He only owes answers to one person, and it isn’t this embittered doppelgänger.

“I should have expected that,” Armitage mutters, exhaling shortly and standing with a slow stretch of his shoulders. He proceeds to go quiet for a few moments too long for comfort, then reaches backward, pulling out the same weapon he’d used to get Hux up here.

Hux feels his body tense, ashamed to find himself swallowing tight as Armitage flips it twice in one hand, practically careless about it. The approaching blow is obvious, but that doesn’t make the split-second agony between it and darkness any more tolerable.

~

It’s the telltale echo of a familiar yell that brings Hux to consciousness this time, and with more than just discomfort as a result – his head is _throbbing_ with physical pain leftover from the stock of the weapon. The sun outside seems still to be shining straight in his eyes, maybe from a few degrees higher than when he’d looked before, so it can’t be much later – unless, of course, it’s been over a day, but he thinks he’d be feeling far more miserable.

A second nebulous shout startles him out of the pointless thought, cable ties digging agonizingly into his wrists at the movement. He tries to angle an ear closer to the door, listening for more – it's Ren, it has to be. He's angry about something and loud as ever about it, but his words are too muffled to make out with any sort of clarity.

“Ren!” Hux yells, feeling the shout ricochet through his head like a shot, agony pounding between his temples. “Ren, I’m – Let it alone, Ren! I’m here!”

He tilts his head again, taking a panting breath and trying to determine if he’s been heard, but nothing of the fight seems to have changed in tone or beat. A tight swallow and a frantic glance up confirms his only option: dislodging the oar. It’s connected to the boat by a pair of steel loops, and no amount of frantic wriggling has proven useful in budging it from the position. He feels like a fool even thinking about his next move, and hopes he’s still up to it, for all he’s creeping up to thirty-five. He stretches his legs out for the next few seconds, counting to five, then ten, and trying not to listen to the barely-audible quarrel just outside.

He inhales deep and puts as much effort into stretching unused muscle to flip his legs up, kicking hard as he can at the oar, pain lancing through his thighs as he keeps striking out at an awkward angle just near his head. He used to be in practice of all sorts of ludicrous yoga positions right up until a few years ago; the exercises were meant to calm his mind, which they hardly did, leading to it having been little more than wasted effort in flexibility until – until right _now_. He falls with a pained yelp onto his tailbone, one of the clamps breaking neatly off the boat and dropping him to the floor.

He scrambles up on shaky legs and toward the door, only to find that the doorknob is angled into a manner that he can’t quite step through the awkward, narrow opening with his hands tied at the front. He tries to shove through, but the door refuses to be thrown open even when he tries to hook the bottom with his toe, only succeeding in slamming it closed again when he loses balance.

A startled, agonized yell nearly makes him jump out of his skin, stepping backward and knocking a rusty pump off a shelf, and he desperately starts to rearrange the cable tie with his teeth, knowing what he’s supposed to do but sure it’s going to add up to nothing. The self-defense videos he had forced himself to watch, after his paranoia got the better of him going into illicit meetings, had all been done by men with large chests and wide waists, not underfed arms dealers with backgrounds in academic professorship.

A deep breath and a nod are all he allows himself before shoving his elbows hard backward, slamming himself in the abdomen with his bound wrists. It hurts like a dull knife attempting to slice down over his skin, but he’s certainly not breaking anything other than his own body.

He looks up and away from the tie after another failed try, staring for a long moment at the musty, sea-rotten ceiling. He swallows hard, feeling an absolutely mortifying uselessness burn up into the back of his throat. He shakes his head when another shout comes from outside, conspicuously weaker, and draws his arms back across his hips with more desperation than strength driving his limbs.

The cable tie finally breaks, the snap of plastic lancing across his wrists at the outside of the yank. His hands drop like weights to his sides, but he manages to lift them and force his fingers to stretch out, idle numbness receding with painful waves of prickling needles. The skin around his wrists is rubbed raw and red in some places, stinging in the damp air, but it’s almost a relief just to see the damage with his own eyes.

He rushes forward as quick as he can, pulling at the door and squeezing out onto the boathouse steps to look desperately across the apparent docks in the direction he’d heard the shouts. He can’t see anything untoward, just a few anchored sailboats and a pair of bobbing docks to split them apart. “Ren!”

Hux scrambles down slippery wood and nearly stumbles to his knees on the last step to solid land, balancing himself on the rail before pushing off in a more teetering direction. He looks around and desperately tries to catch sight on the fight that he _knows_ he’s heard, but there are few people on the docks and it’s fallen silent of shouting, which strikes a particular uneven beat to his heart that winds straight up into his throat. He pauses at a wall, stone and seemingly meant to break up parts of the inner dock from another public building, and realizes with some trepidation that both Ren and he are definitely tall enough to be seen over it.

The shock he finds after tearing forward to round the partition is a wrenching, as the first thing he catches on is Ren curled in on himself on the ground, blood across his face and seeping down into his chest. Skywalker kneels at his side, appearing to try and hold the blood in, her hands stained a glossy red where she’s pressing a wad of fabric to Ren’s face. 

No, no, _no_.

“Hux,” Ren croaks, turning his head at the same moment he reaches out past Rey, grabbing at the air. He actually looks relieved, a pained twitch upward at the corner of his mouth because he’s insane. “Hey.”

“Ren, no,” Hux says, rushing forward now in a stilted jog and doing his best to shove Skywalker off without actually touching her. He’s on his knees before he knows it, an ache high in his throat and forcing his voice into a rasp; he absolutely hates this moron, getting hurt and having the gall to make Hux care so much. “What did he do to your face? Did he cut your throat – are you dying?”

Ren shrugs awkwardly from his place lain out, curling slightly into Hux’s lap with a stuttery, almost hysterical chuckle. His voice has a slight lisp when he speaks, “Just a little bloody.”

Skywalker clears her throat, “Dr Hux, you – ”

“Don’t fucking touch me,” Hux snaps, finding himself clutching harder onto Ren, keeping the apparent blazer held where Skywalker had left it, and refusing to turn around or look up; he doesn’t think he could bear the sight of the agent with the judgment, the _knowledge,_ in her eyes that this is his fault. He had to go for a smoke, didn’t he? He couldn’t have just channeled his vices for the morning into sex or greasy food; no, it had to be the bloody nicotine.

“It’s okay,” Ren says, his arms curling clumsily around Hux’s bent legs in the side in a manner that is not particularly comforting.

“This is not _okay_ ,” Hux disagrees, taking a shaky breath and longing for the bravery to pull the bloodied jacket away, to see the damage underneath with his own eyes rather than building it up worse and worse within his mind.

“It’s mostly blood,” Ren says, continuing the trend of not doing much to assuage any fear – though, he’d probably be less chatty if he were dying.  “I think maybe it went through my cheek.”

“Just stop talking,” Hux says, grabbing at Ren’s shoulder and trying to get him to quiet, “Stop it.”

“Hux,” Ren says slow, his voice going hushed as he leans in, one of his hands curling around Hux’s waist and slipping down to squeeze at his hip. “It’s okay – ”

“Shut up,” Hux repeats harsher, ignoring the still rising pitch of his tone, now practically scraping up his throat and heedless of all reason.  “Shut _up_. You look half dead – you’re crying!”

“I cry about lots of things,” Ren mutters, because of course he’d acknowledge that now and just to get his way.  

“Where did he have you?” Skywalker asks, interrupting again, though her voice is from conspicuously farther away, echoing around the concrete.

Hux just shakes his head, wadding up the blazer more to pressing at the mess of Ren’s neck, trying to soak up some of the blood from where it’s starting to dry. He pulls at a limp arm to get Ren up in the next moment, because they need to find an A&E, get patched up, and a damned upstart agent isn’t about to stop him with such things as questioning his whereabouts.

“Huh?” Ren mumbles, stumbling upward and looking over Hux’s shoulder with a short downturn at his lips. “What are _you_ looking at?”

Hux turns to follow the attention with frown, only to find Skywalker simply sending Ren a particularly narrow look, thin brows closing in to furrow over her nose.

“Later,” Hux snaps, looking backward with a snarl only to catch a mess of red seeping down Ren’s face, blazer having fallen to the ground; the sight brings back his shock just to compound it into dread, and he finds himself gaping at the series of thin slashes up Ren’s neck, messily merging into a particularly wide gash that goes up across his cheek.

“Hux,” Ren says, leaning heavily into Hux’s shoulder, his voice louder than should be for his intended whisper. “I’m fine.”

“Thank you, Ren,” Hux says, taking back the blazer from the ground, shoving it back into place, and starting for the most apparent exit of the dock. He finds himself fielding sidelong looks from a pair of curious boardwalk yuppies, sending them a glare that has them turnig quickly back to the water. “Your opinion is noted.”

“Do you need a ride?” Skywalker calls after, as Dameron groggily looks around from her side. She pulls at his arm, steadying him and holding him up as she points back and down the top of a black sedan peeking just visible from the steps.

Hux takes a short breath, tightening his hand around Ren’s arm at the realization that he had somehow completely forgotten they didn’t have their own car. “ _Yes_ , obviously.”

“No,” Ren disagrees, his voice again too loud, though now by being an outright yell, and far more intentional this time by the way he jerks his arm back from Hux. 

“Do not act like a spoiled child,” Hux says, reaching out to grab Ren again, pulling him in close to snarl at that blood and tear-stained face, to make certain he knows that he’s no agency in this fight. “You’re getting in that car!”

Ren actually shrinks back, much to Hux’s dismay, but shrugs assent with a quick glance down and away. “Okay.”

~

The building that Skywalker pulls up to is decidedly not a hospital. It has a red cross on the sign, certainly; a label that says emergency treatment available, undoubtedly; but it is not remotely a medical institution Hux approves of.

“First thing,” Dameron says, turning around in his seat before Hux can utter a word to complain, which is only another incredibly frustrating thing about today. “They won’t ask questions, which is good – second, is they think Rey is a demon, so that’s a little awkward.”

“Hah,” Ren says, though it’s little more than a mumble into Hux’s shoulder.

“That’s not true,” Skywalker interrupts, turning the key from the ignition and sparing a quick grimace backward, her glare more aimed at Dameron than Ren. “The head nurse simply… disagreed with a method I used. For capture. But we’re alright now.”

“Why aren’t we at a _hospital_?” Hux asks, sparing another glance to the barred glass on the clinic door, then looking a suite down to what is very obviously a chop-shop.

“Uh, well,” Dameron glances sidelong, catching Skywalker’s eyes, who shrugs back, “We don’t… We really don’t have clearance for any of this… _crazy_ shit. So nice, anonymous free clinic.”

Hux reaches up with a sigh, keen to rub the frustration from his brow, only to find himself caught momentarily on the broken ring of scabs now decorating his wrist. He drops the hand with a short pull to get the sleeves down, looking away and blindly pushing a whining Ren toward the opposite door. “Fine.”

The door clangs with the sound of a physical bell; it’s a surprise enough that Hux manages to meet the short shift forward that is startled out of Ren, reaching backward and grabbing at his side to steady him. The front is dotted with various and sundry that must be gifts from past patients, though none of them sought to buy furniture by the decades-old orange and brown décor.

A tiny nurse, in what almost looks like a nun’s habit, greets them as she pops out from behind the counter, immediately shooing them with a raised finger and a Quebecois accent. “No, Skywalker! I told you the last time was the _last_!”

“We actually have someone hurt, though,” Skywalker argues, pulling Ren from his place behind Hux to the forefront, practically brandishing him like a defense. “See! I’m not – going to do _that_ again.”

“Goodness, what has happened?” The nurse titters with sudden change of heart, their commotion seeming to prompt another nurse in a set of comfortingly modern scrubs to appear, blink widely up and down Ren, then look past him to scowl at Skywalker.

“It wasn’t me,” Skywalker says, stepping back, as they reach for Ren, with an unsubtle slump to her shoulders.

“Erin – take him to room two,” the now-apparent head nurse orders, pushing Ren and pointing a stubby finger down a dim hall.

Hux barely manages to catch Ren’s eyes, swallowing back an entirely ludicrous well at the back of his throat. It’s going to be barely two thin walls, at most, but here he is tempted to push through just so Ren doesn’t step out of his sight, like he’s a damned child and not a grown man.

“Sit down,” the nurse says, gesturing with both hands at the ratty waiting area. “Magazines. Your friend will be back out soon.”

“Hey, uh,” Dameron says, looking vaguely over Hux with a sidelong look, seeming by rote than with any true concern. “Dr Hux, are you – ”

“I’m fine,” Hux interrupts, sitting hesitantly into an itchy, worn chair. He glances across the pair of them, narrowing his eyes, “Where’s your new expert?”

“He’s teaching a class,” Skywalker says, heaving a sigh as she reaches for a yellowing _Home &Garden_, sagging in her seat with visible dissatisfaction at the reminder. “I guess.”

“Ah,” Hux intones, looking down with a grimace, only to catch the pale reminder of an absent ring around his finger. He curls his hand into a fist, trying to ignore it; he’s fairly sure he can get a new one, probably without any difficulty, but it won’t be the same. His is undoubtedly at the bottom of the harbor, or being held to melt down in some sort of effigy.

“Alright, fine!” A shout rings out, loud and biting, followed by the conspicuous noise of a door hitting a wall.

Hux finds himself unwillingly made a participant in spectacle as all three of them look up at the same time, glancing to each other in as a door shuts and the nurse that had taken Ren appears at the head of the dim hall. It’s clear enough that it’s to do with Ren, but it gets less worrying and simply confusing when they linger, as if something has been lost in the room. They perk up slightly when the door opens with a clank, then frown when it’s a small family that the other nurse was expecting.

They quickly step over and glance across the clinic again, an uncertain frown settling across their mouth when they look very pointedly to Dameron. “Hey, um, did you have someone else with you – Amy? Amy Hux.”

“Armie,” Hux corrects under his breath, reaching up for a quick moment to pinch between his brows. He exhales slowly and stands, ignoring the snickers of the supposed professionals in the seats next to him. “ _Armitage,_ actually, which I only assume he didn’t use because he still can’t correctly say it.”

The nurse stares at Hux for a long moment, searching like there might be some other meaning to the words, before rolling their eyes and gesturing toward the back. “Okay, come on.”

“Hey,” Ren mutters, glancing up to Hux with a grimacing sort-of smile. His face has been wiped clean, leaving visible only slowly seeping red cuts and a faint tinge of yellow disinfectant.

“Being a brat?” Hux asks, reaching up and carefully turning Ren’s head with a firm grasp on his chin; the injuries are less dire than feared, but still far too bloody and angry.

The worst one splits into Ren’s jaw, up across his cheek and very near into his eye, but it’s noticeably an outlier. The others seem almost intentionally shallow, meant to hurt, and the scrubbing has made clear they’re focused across the previously lovely smudge of bruises along his neck, which promptly settles a heavy weight of shame at the center of Hux’s chest. It’s always so _nice_ to see a physical consequence to his lack of self-control.

It doesn’t make any sort of sense to have… _None_ of it makes sense. He doesn’t understand why Armitage would maim Ren before trying to kill him, not when he seemed in such a hurry – pacing, looking out windows...

“Stitches suck,” Ren says, interrupting the thought with a heartfelt complaint, peering up from his seat on the low cot. “They gave me lidocaine – I can’t feel my face.”

“That’s rather the point,” Hux reminds, pulling his hand back and letting dropping it to his side, catching sight of a wool chair that has been apparently provided by the eighties. He sits down in it with a mild grimace, rolling his eyes but complying when Ren gestures for him to pull it closer to the cot.

“Alright, now that everyone is here,” the nurse says, turning around on the stool with a white tube, setting it down on the small tray already laden with needles and suture thread. “We can get started.”

“2-octyl cyanoacrylate,” Ren says, reaching out and pointing at the tube with a short hum.

“Uh, yeah,” the nurse says, their voice lowering into a mutter as they reach for the needle, carefully picking it and the sutures up with both hands. “ _Dermabond_. Does he do that a lot?”

“Yes,” Hux says shortly, rolling his eyes with a narrow look at the hand conspicuously nudging against his thigh. If Ren thinks he’s going to get away with that when he’s only been treated with lidocaine, he’s… well, not _entirely_ wrong.

The nurse goes quiet for a few moments, then clears their throat, spinning on the stool with a low creak of ungreased metal. “Okay then,” they say, suddenly reaching up to gesture at their own cheek, catching Ren’s eyes with the movement. “First, we’ll start with the stitches here, at the worst part, then we’ll do the glue on your neck and in your cheek.”

“Whatever,” Ren says, turning his head to show the grisly split down his cheek. “Don’t fuck it up.”

The nurse looks to Hux, seemingly for some manner of support, but smartly looks back down when all they receive is a scowl of similar judgment. It’s their job – they had better do it well, for all this a back-alley clinic that seems to be no more reputable than a veterinarian’s office.

Ren is quiet for most of it, eyes downcast and fingers twitching against Hux’s leg, but seems to have little other complaint. The only difficult part seems to be when the nurse addresses the inside of his cheek, a mild curse under their breath, prompting Hux to reach down quick and pinch him before he might actually bite down on ungentle fingers.

“Alright, you can have the room for a couple minutes,” the nurse says, smoothing padded gauze down and across Ren’s jaw with a length of tape. They roll up the short length left from the job and glance over to a shiny metal can, throwing much of it in with barely a look over. “But don’t do anything weird.”

Ren scoffs under his breath as the nurse stands, shifting down on the cot so he’s flat on his back, though the sneer he sends to the ceiling is sign enough he caught the nurse’s parting gesture. It’s entirely unclear what could have happened in the five minutes that Ren was in here alone, but admittedly not much of a surprise.

“What happened?” Hux asks quietly, clearing his throat when his tone comes out hoarse; he doesn’t mean with the nurse.

Ren hums low and turns his head on the cot, a slippery, pained smile across his face. “I just knew it wasn’t you.”

“I would hope so,” Hux says, feeling slightly a fool for being condescending while the inside of his mind is nothing but a flurry of anxiety, and gratitude, and then, behind every idle thought, even more panic. “Did it really take him stabbing you to realize that?”

Ren rolls his eyes to the ceiling with a scowl.

Hux waits for the quiet to go on for almost a minute, then exhales heavily, “ _Ren_.”

“It was weird, alright? He… He came up to me and started saying all this stuff; you know, like, I was going to really think he was you – actually, he threw the ring at me and everything,” Ren says, voice lowering as he leans awkwardly on the cot, digging into his pocket. He fishes out said ring trapped and small between two shaky fingers, shining dull in the clinical light.

Hux finds himself caught on the sight of it, forgetting how much he cared about the story and instead focusing down at the ring with a little thrill at the back of his throat. He wants desperately to reach out and grab it. “Oh.”

“I think he was really talking to, uh – Kylo,” Ren says, clumsily pushing up from the cot, his hand slipping on the paper; it requires a great deal of control for Hux not to just shove him back down flat. “Said stuff about like, choosing a side or something.”

Hux nods slow, glancing back down to the ring again and lifting his hand, trying to snatch it, only to find himself caught in Ren’s tremulous grip. He swallows thickly, heat blooming across his cheeks as Ren slides the ring on with a careful twist. It feels like half the lingering anxiety abates in that instant, calming from a boil to a simmer. 

“And you know,” Ren continues, as if he hasn’t just arguably done the most romantic thing in their entire relationship. He reaches up to gesture at his neck with an open hand. “I shouldn’t have – I’m sorry I bitched about the hickey. It kind of saved my life.”

“Excuse me?” Hux says, blinking up in disbelief; he must have missed something in the ten seconds or so he let his mind relax.

“Because, you know,” Ren drops his hand, sparing a dissatisfied smirk and shrugging weakly with one shoulder. “He got distracted being all crazy ex until Rey showed up.”

“He told me he was going to kill you,” Hux says, glancing again at the bandage down and across Ren’s face and neck, absently rubbing at the still-stinging marks around his own wrists. He should have been able to get out quicker and stopped Armitage on his own, rather than letting him get to Ren.

“I dunno, I think he was just pissed. I tried to shove him off, but – ” Ren rolls his eyes, drawing the backs of his knuckles down the side of his bandaged face, creasing the gauze, “I accidentally did this one. The knife slipped. Kind of.”

Hux feels his mouth drop open, a hysterical chuckle escaping. “ _Ren_.”

“Yeah, shut up,” Ren snaps, hunching just slightly into himself with completely sensible shame, eyes rolling sideways with a grumble. “He had like a… glass knife? I couldn’t see, but it – ”

“Couldn’t see the _knife_?” Hux interrupts to clarify, narrowing his eyes and determinedly catching Ren’s for a short, tense moment.

Ren tilts his head back and forth, mouth twisting up to the side. “I could see it from the side I guess, it was black like – maybe it was obsidian?”

Hux rolls his eyes away with a low exhale, staring hard at the creased edge of the cot, as he listens to Ren try to convince himself that his recollection makes any sort of sense. It’s true enough that he’s unspeakably relieved that Armitage hadn’t simply gone out and shot Ren, but he’s somehow a little embarrassed for him – he’s just being so sloppy with what he’s said is a _mission_.

“Whatever,” Ren says, voice going some odd version of stern, squaring his shoulders with visible embarrassment when Hux looks up to raise an eyebrow at him. “Like I said – I think he was just using me to say stuff he wanted to say to Kylo.”

Hux feels his expression fall, furrowing his brow as previously ignored details align into bemused anger. They can hardly afford to miscommunicate at this point, let alone outright lie to each other, and yet, “You said they _weren’t_ together.”

“I…” Ren inhales, eyes going wide before hastily glancing down, an entirely caught expression crossing his face. “You – he… He _was_ getting married to Mitaka.”

“Not by choice,” Hux says, hearing his voice getting sharp with frustration, slightly relieved that it actually helps this all feel a little more normal. “Apparently. And by that look, you bloody well knew that.”

Ren rolls his lips between his teeth, exhaling heavily through his nose and very obviously turning focus on something just over Hux’s shoulder. “I didn’t _know_ ,” he sighs, practically shaking his head – a classic evasive move, for as much as it ever works. “I just heard the one fight after they broke up.”

“Why are you such – such a…” Hux takes a long breath, pinching at the bridge of his nose and trying to understand; he’s not sure why he even attempts it, nothing has made any sense in the last couple of days. He grits his teeth, exhaling slowly, “You cannot even excuse this with crime of passion; it took over a month. How could you be so concerned for these bloody strangers?”

“I don’t know,” Ren mutters, leaning back and then sitting right up with an abrupt start when his back hits the wall, a twist at his lips marring his expression, accusatory and quickly rising to meet Hux’s anger. “ _You_ wouldn’t even kiss me for the cameras when I got sentenced. I’m sorry I was jealous of a fucking murderer.”

“You were behind a plexiglass wall,” Hux snaps, straightening in the chair to get as tall as he can without actually standing, leaning forward with a short lift of his chin. “And _crying_.”

“Fuck you,” Ren snarls, hunching down in the already-low cot with a grimace crossing his mouth, dragging his eyes around the room with exaggerated petulance. “You didn’t even care – you couldn’t even fake it. Fucking robot.”

Hux gives a short, disbelieving scoff, faintly sure the expression he feels crossing his face is turning to something ugly and vaguely hysterical. “Do you really want to have this conversation right now?”

“Why not?” Ren peeks up under his bangs, revealing a pair of angry, sullen eyes, his mouth curled into a sneer. He glances pointedly towards the door, gesturing with his chin. “You won’t run with them outside to watch.”

“Oh, is that the tone we’re setting?” Hux asks lowly, swallowing tight and faintly hearing his breath begin to rasp in the silence between them. He can feel an awful, choking fog roll over his mind and silence any ideas to defend himself; all that frustration and anger, the nightmarish image now burned into his mind of Ren desperately clutching at a bloodied face. 

He _knew_ Ren was going to bring this up, throw it in his face with more fury than his so-far tepid accusations, but did the bastard really have to choose just after he nearly died? He couldn’t have waited until they were free to shout at each other on a sparsely habited island, without sick children and FBI agents listening just on the other side of thin walls?

It’s just too much to shove against his already teetering self control; overwrought letters, evil doppelgängers, secret houses, megalomaniac advisors – and none of it good reflected on him. Every new addition to his life over the last few days has just been one new stressor after another, impossible layering onto improbable, his recent mistakes blending with those long past and exposing his wounded pride to salt.

The onslaught of regret manifests first in a harmless-enough tightness at the back of his throat, though it quickly begins to almost burn with the power of an ache that spreads like an infection, down into his chest and up into his eyes. The feeling is relentless in its takeover, ignoring all protests from his intelligent mind that this is not the time to get fraught or panic-stricken; he has to keep his mind on goal, keep Ren handled, but it’s all suddenly so _hard_.

“Could you shelve this?”  Hux asks, hearing his voice so hoarse that it’s barely a whisper. He hasn’t come this close to crying while sober since he was a child, and it’s just as humiliating now as it was in front of a floundering Maratelle.

At least Ren isn’t awkwardly telling him he’ll stain his nice little suit, though what he’s doing is quickly becoming worse.

“Hux!? What are – ?” Ren frantically pats at Hux’s shoulders, evidently at a complete loss, before loosely curling his arms around him despite the awkward, elevated angle. His mouth is just over Hux’s ear when he speaks, attempting sarcasm even as his voice begins to shake. “Since when can you _cry_?”

“Get fucked,” Hux mumbles wetly, mortified and trying to protest he _isn’t_ , but the dark space between his hands is quickly growing damp. He doesn’t like this at all – how does Ren do it so often without just wasting away from the shame?

Hux jumps back with a sharp, sniffling inhale at a sudden crash, quickly followed by the skitter of objects across linoleum. He blinks down at the mess of packaged cotton balls and glass, then looks up with a start when it’s joined by a metal tin that hits the wall and spills open to reveal sterilized packets.

“Ren, stop,” Hux croaks, reaching out to grab at Ren’s arm and managing to force the offending hand down. He takes a deep breath, clearing his throat and doing his best to pretend that the tears still trailing down his face are just some regrettable hallucination. “You’re only making it worse.”

“That’s all I ever do,” Ren mutters, but his body loses some of the tension as his shoulders slump down, both hands flattening onto the cot with a distinct crumple. "I didn't _mean_ it."

Hux leans back in the chair and wipes his face with the heel of a hand, pressing hard into one of his eyes while trying to concentrate on the fact Ren has predictably joined in on the humiliation, rather than the continuing roil of shame deep in his gut. He can handle Ren better than himself, at least, has tolerated his tears in more situations than he cares to think about, and that’s just the last twenty-four hours.

“Shit!” Ren gasps, as his hand tightens without warning around the sores around Hux’s wrist, pulling his hand from his face.

Hux hisses under his breath in surprise, yanking it right back. “ _Ben_ , that _hurts_!”

“Fuck,” Ren says, turning in on himself and looking shocked, for all his damp eyes remain still fixed on Hux’s wrists. He slips off the cot, oddly graceful about it, and practically kneels between Hux’s knees in some bid to get a better look. “Sorry. I – I... Does it hurt bad?”

Hux is quiet for a moment, then sighs, hearing his voice come out hoarser than the snide tone he was going for, still half-furious at his own traitorous body and refusing to sniffle even a little. “Obviously.”

Ren curls his hands awkwardly around Hux’s wrist again, though his thumbs are softer now as they trace over the marks. “You look worse than me.”

“Not possible,” Hux says, forcing his tone dry, and tilting his head up when Ren predictably tips forward precariously on his toes, determinedly burrowing into Hux’s neck and trapping their hands between them.

It should be uncomfortable for Ren to the point of pain, with that long line of gauze still betraying stitches underneath, but he doesn’t seem to notice. “Fuck,” he mutters, his heavy exhale palpable even through the starch of Hux’s shirt collar. “We should just leave.”

“I’ve been saying that,” Hux says, lifting his free hand to clumsily drag through Ren’s hair, trying not to let a leftover tremble reach his fingertips.

Ren pulls back with a low sigh, his hands squeezing a few moments around Hux’s ribs before he stands. “Get up there,” he says, gesturing to the cot and turning around to approach the medical cabinet, wiping at his own eyes with the stained color of his shirt, “I’ll find something.”

“Are you into this?” Hux asks, leaning back and watching Ren dig into drawers with little abandon, peering at labels with narrowed eyes at the smallest of print. “Dr Organa?”

“Uh…” Ren tilts his head, looking back over and tossing a tube in his hand, then catching Hux’s eyes with a grimace. “Not really – is that weird?”

“It doesn’t do much for me either,” Hux admits, tipping his head slightly and settling more firmly on the cot.

“Oh,” Ren intones, expression falling slightly as he glances back down and starts unscrewing the cap. “Then… what?”

“Just that bloody nurse,” Hux says, lifting his arms when Ren moves forward, brandishing gel that gets summarily daubed carefully over the sores.

It does feel a little bit better, even after mere seconds, the cool gel numbing the sting and soothing the grating itch. He probably would have picked and worried them into scars, and it would’ve been worth it for the way Ren is going to live with worse across his _face_.

“Anyway,” Ren clears his throat, rubbing in the gel with a slow swirl of his fingers, mouth pinching in concentration. “Don’t cry again. It’s gravely contagious.”

Hux rolls his eyes at the anatomy poster edging just over Ren’s shoulder. He certainly wishes it were just that easy – to his credit, he hadn’t since the drunken disaster of years ago, so that had to mean something.

“And you get blotchy,” Ren continues, picking up both of Hux’s hands to look at his work with some apparent consideration for faults. “Like your blood doesn’t know where to go.”

Hux exhales a short huff, trying not to remember his similar thoughts regarding Armitage, and turns his wrists over when Ren changes his grip. “I do so apologize for not having as much practice as you.”

Ren mutters something low and mocking under his breath, dropping Hux’s hands with a peculiar shake of his head. He turns around and puts the tube back onto the counter, then huffs, looking back up and catching Hux’s eyes, drawn-out long enough that there’s time enough to figure out what he’s about to do and prepare for it.

Hux straightens just as Ren crushes into his chest and gracelessly pulls them together, mouths meeting in something less like a kiss and more like an offensive. He reaches up after a few moments to grab the back of Ren’s head, twisting his fingers into thick hair and pulling him away. “Fuck,” he murmurs between their mouths. “ _Ren_.”

“I’m so goddamn happy you’re okay,” Ren gasps, pressing forward again and virtually trying to consume, nose pressing hard into Hux’s cheek with every shift of their mouths.

The door opens a low creak, startling them apart with little more than reflex. It feels foolish in an instant, heat digging up under Hux’s jaw – they’re already wearing rings, the damage is done.

A low tut sounds as the nurse from before pokes their head in to glance back and forth, a frown instantly digging into their expression as their eyes land on the mess of the floor. They look up with a scowl, only to pause, mouth dropping open as they glance across Hux's arms. “Did you have injuries, too?”

“It’s been treated,” Hux says, straightening his sleeves again to cover the marks; he doesn’t need the FBI to start in on them, as he’s sure they would if just to point out more of his faults. “Thank you.”

The nurse is quiet for a moment, then takes a long, needlessly deep inhale, stepping back to hold the door open. “I hope you two found your care acceptable, but I need the room.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think this is going to be about 9 chapters, depending on the direction I choose to go - i had a sudden idea of who could be a Peter well after writing my initial draft, probably someone obvious, and now I'm like SUPER tempted to use that and risk extending this out into something ludicrous.

**Author's Note:**

> Rating is likely to become Explicit when they manage to get some damned privacy. 
> 
> I'm working on this between KRB and a few other indulgent things, but the current draft for the first three chapters is about 20k, so it will 100% be finished.
> 
> i’m also on [tumblr](http://ezlebe.tumblr.com) if anyone is interested


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